Tuesday, December 22, 2009
fee's LIST (winter 2010 preview)
Going into holiday (i.e. hibernation) mode, finally, but check this teaser of the dope stuff coming in winter 2010 (and that doesn't even count New Year's! I'm doing this. Frankie and the Outs + Surfer Blood (and Beach Fossils, yes!! and more) @ Cameo Gallery in Wsburg. How about you?
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Pop Jew's Lonely Christmas Eve Party
Pop Jew's Lonely Christmas Eve Party is DOPE.
It is easy to do an indie New Year's in NYC, or an indie Hanukkah — loads of options if you know where to look. But an indie Christmas Eve? Luckily Rachel, aka Pop Jew, hostess/curator of some of the dopest indie music parties, is on it w/ a LIST-certified dope yuletide event:
Punk rock X-mas anthems, courtesy of DJs Eric Lastname and Rock 'n Roll James. Traditional stuff like mistletoe for smooching. And this is at the LIST-certified venue Bruar Falls, which serves like five varieties of hot toddy, incl. the classic whisk(e)y-based and newfangled varieties. Oh and the show is FREE. Sweet. Thanks, Pop Jew!
It is easy to do an indie New Year's in NYC, or an indie Hanukkah — loads of options if you know where to look. But an indie Christmas Eve? Luckily Rachel, aka Pop Jew, hostess/curator of some of the dopest indie music parties, is on it w/ a LIST-certified dope yuletide event:
Punk rock X-mas anthems, courtesy of DJs Eric Lastname and Rock 'n Roll James. Traditional stuff like mistletoe for smooching. And this is at the LIST-certified venue Bruar Falls, which serves like five varieties of hot toddy, incl. the classic whisk(e)y-based and newfangled varieties. Oh and the show is FREE. Sweet. Thanks, Pop Jew!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
fee's LIST (through 12/22)
WEDNESDAY
* Richard Hamilton: Selected Prints from the Collection, 1970-2005 @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). You might know British artist Hamilton from his tiny mid-'50s collage "Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?", which more or less ushered in Pop Art. Guess what! That was over five decades ago and he is STILL doing his thing, collage, intaglio, digital techniques, even a series based 'round James Joyce's "Ulysses". This curated selection of two dozen works should bring us up to date w/ Hamilton's master printmaking.
* "Rebels of the Neon God" (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette, Ft Greene (D/M/NR to Pacific, 23/45/Q to Atlantic), 6:50/9:15p. The Taiwanese New Wave pioneer's debut film bears little resemblance to his later, sparser, tenser, dialogue-light works, but the ingredients for them are all in place here. Like: the enigmatic youthful lead Lee Kang-sheng, the friction b/w family, independence and love, and the hypnotic, techno-fueled pulse of the night city.
THURSDAY
* Small Black DJ set @ Insound Design Store / 303 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. So Insound is hosting a popup store for the holidays w/ special DJs and free booze every night for five nights. This is night one: 2009's glo-fi trend summed up in one impossibly wicked duo. Thank you, Insound, for deciding my Thursday night plans for me!
* "The Chelsea Girls" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1966) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. I may have seen Warhol's notorious dual-projection, lengthy psych-trip more times than anyone you know. And I want to see it again: Mary Wonorov and Ingrid Superstar mugging for the camera, Ondine's equally harsh and honeyed prosthelytizing, and Nico's tearful face against carousel lights.
* Future Islands @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Baltimore's Future Islands may sound a bit soft & fuzzy on album, but these guys rock exceedingly hard live. Their remix EP "Post Office Wave Chapel" release party also includes sets by glitterfied Pictureplane (playing a few dates in NYC) and Brooklyn's slightly trashy Javelin, who each contributed a remix.
* Pterodactyl @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Been too long since I've experienced Pterodactyl's white-hot frenzy, which always manages to be melodic despite the shrill guitars and trundling drums. w/ Julianna Barwick.
* Robert Longo, David Malijkovic, John Miller "Ongoing Projects" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Newly realized works from the respective artists' careers, incl. new prints from Longo's '70s-era 'Men in the Cities', a slew of photography from Miller's 'Middle of the Day' project', and Malijkovic's newest film 'Out of Projection'.
* "5000 Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). If you've not checked out the sensational samurai armor and armaments special exhibition, here's another tasty, albeit peaceful, bijoux. The Met unveils acquisitions of screen paintings, Buddhist scrolls, sliding door panels, sculptures, all sorts of stuff spanning from arcane times to the nineteenth century.
* Hélio Oiticica "Drawings 1954-1958" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. A rare showing of the Brazilian artist's minimalist works on paper.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / 149 7th St, Gowanus (F/G/R to 9th St/4th Ave), $15 day or $40 pass (available @ the door Thursday or). This mad three-night festival of circuit-benders, NES-hackers and pixel punks is in its 4th year. I realize a dude jamming onstage to a Gameboy might sound sort of odd on print, but when you're *there*, dancing to said dude w/ Gameboy, you'll feel quite different. There's something wicked each night. My highlights: 8bitpeoples legend Minusbaby (he cuts a wicked Mario Bros dungeon track), extra-dirty Chromix, + NYC's 8bit-graphics-alchemist Jean Y. Kim, who is handling most of the visuals this year.
FRIDAY
* Tanlines + Future Islands @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle, L to Jefferson), 8p. Pick your poison. If you can't make DbA on Thursday and really, really want to see Future Islands (and Pictureplane), check out this extra lo-fi dance night, headlined by Brooklyn's always-reliable ketamine-house-inflected Tanlines.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / (see info above). Night two is HOT, as nullsleep (aka like the best known 8-bit musician, IMO) has a set. He is matched by duo Starscream and by Berlin's Patric C, whose breakcore is a bit like harsh Aphex Twin filtered through his NES.
SATURDAY
* Blank Dogs @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. In case you missed Blank Dogs' wall-of-sound set from last Sunday in Wsburg, you've got another great opportunity to lose yourself in their glammy distortion.
* The Babies + Gary War @ Ash's Place / 234 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Brooklyn swingy-indie The Babies (Cassie Ramone from Vivian Girls, plus guys from Woods and Bossy) headline a pretty dope show of hot left-of-margin bands, incl. underwater Joy Division-ish Gary War and stripped-down surf duet Coasting.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / (see info above). Big closing night, thanks to NYC's Bubblyfish (I caught her soulful Gameboy set back in 2007) w/ Blip Festival co-curator Bit Shifter and more.
SUNDAY
* The Pains of Being Pure at Heart DJ set @ Insound Design Store / 303 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. So Insound is hosting a popup store for the holidays w/ special DJs and free booze every night for five nights. This is night four: Brooklyn's finest twee-rockers on deck. Thank you, Insound, for deciding my Sunday night plans for me!
* Post-Blip Showcase @ Public Assembly / 70 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10p/$5. Or if you either can't be bothered to trek out to Gowanus-area Brooklyn and drop $15 on a night of hot 8-bit beats... Honestly this party sounds super cool, and super hard, thanks to headliners Anamanaguchi, the finest NES-punksters I know. w/ Starpause, IAYD, and visuals by the inexhaustible Jean Y. Kim.
MONDAY
* Knight School + Christmas Lights (aka Bright Lights) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$2. A two-dollar (!!) holiday show at Cake Shop, headlined by Brooklyn's Knight School, playing that brand of lo-fi catchy pop and playing it well. Nice.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Zhang Huan "Neither Coming Nor Going" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Zhang's second solo show w/ the gallery is an overall calmer affair than last year's, though it maintains two of his signature recurring elements: monumental scale and ash. This time both figure into one piece, the 18'-tall "Rulai", an ash Buddha imbued w/ relics, copper dishes and unburned joss sticks. It's actually a few feet taller than his cowhide-composed "Giant No. 3", the woman-and-child sculpture from last year's show, but — and maybe this is b/c the subject matter is a Buddha — this compact-ash sculpture just seems more serene, blending in w/ the architecture and beams of the gallery instead of competing w/ it as a huge installation. Framing "Rulai" are Zhang's new large-scale ink and feather paintings on handmade mulberry paper, depictions of deer and landscapes in the manner of 17th c. calligrapher Bada Shanren and 7th c. Tang Dynasty tome "Tui Bei Tu". My final assessment: last year's debut grabbed our attention. This year's solidifies Zhang's oeuvre in our conscious.
* "Merlin James, Arturo Herrera, Matt Connors "Building on a Cliff" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. A benefit of writing this LIST is my totally subjective approach to the art I cover. And though this is billed as a group show, I suggest you take it as James' highly experimental investigation and variation on landscape painting — leave it as that, a solo show, James', w/ Herrera's and Connors' respective works on the side for amusement. Hell, there's a great short film from Singapore video artist Sherman Ong in the back gallery, just to REALLY mix things up. But if you focus on this 'group show' as James' solo show, and take the layout in a clockwise fashion by heading straight back into the big main gallery space and then follow the wall (and smaller galleries) towards the entrance, tracing James' canvases of innocuous country vistas that suddenly transform into acrylic on translucent screens or jute fabric (like the show's titular work, recalling Joan Miro), literally throwing the traditional medium oil-on-canvas out the window, then returning to it @ the end — only by this point you'll second guess yourself and think the canvas is actually stretched vinyl, like some of his other pieces — and you've just experienced QUITE a show.
* Brian Calvin "Head" @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Canvas-filling heads of long-haired girls, simply situated against beach scenes or patterned wallpaper, sometimes clutching cans of beer.
* Jon Pylypchuk "The War" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. OK picture the puppet-characters from a classic dark-hearted Jim Henson film, or perhaps better yet anything by Tim Burton. Now cross those w/ the tribal masks from the Met's Oceanic Arts dept, only cobble 'em together out of hardware store materials. Illuminate 'em all how you see fit, either incandescent or flickery fire bulbs. Actually, Pylypchuk's show is sort of like that Amex "don't take chances, take charge" commercial, where it's like a series of sad faces and happy faces. I am slightly embarrassed to even know this.
* Anthony McCall "Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence)" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. McCall's yummy 'solid light' works are so pure and fascinating. The notion seems entirely simple: several beams of white light projected in a dark room, but when you watch the beams create ever-morphing elliptical forms on the wall, like greatly magnified amoebas, and THEN you stand inside the smoky beams...let's just call it a very warm, secure, personal experience. 'Transcendent', perhaps.
* Audrey Kawasaki "Hajimari – a prelude" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. The gorg solo debut from the young NYC-based artist, feat. works on paper and sumptuous oils and graphite on wood panels. This is Kawasaki's strongest suit: she exercises a fair level of restraint w/ the paint, allowing the grain and natural scars and imperfections of the wood shine through her fantastical, fairytale-like, and Japanese-inspired renderings of young women. She incorporates backgrounds into her portraits, too, ranging from subtle color gradations that seem to follow the wood's natural pigments to lush rooms and natural environments.
+ James Marshall (Dalek) "And There Was War in Heaven". A hard-edged slew of geometric bijoux to accompany Kawasaki's lovingly organic exhibition. Dalek's works are sort of like late-period Al Held (in palette and technique, but only straight lines) crossed w/ Imagination Station.
* Tim Gardner @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Lone figures in generally recognizable environments (UWS near the Lincoln Center, Central Park, Lake Louise which I grossly mistook for the Grand Canyon, oops...), and sometimes small groups, each rendered like soft photographs in watercolor.
* Sharon Lockhart "Lunch Break" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Really nice exhibition. Lockhart frames an ironworkers' union via indirect means: C-prints focused on their lunchboxes (check the woven-basket one), snack-food commons areas, and this super slo-mo tracking shot of the men at rest. This is executed quite well: we watch the camera slowly, slowwwwly move up this corridor to the din of heavy machinery, passing the workers' lockers and the odd boxy machine, and you probably can't help but gaze at this flanneled dude standing in the middle of the corridor, staring up at something. The guys around him move in and out of frame (albeit very slowly), rustling newspapers or drinking coffee, but this guy stands transfixed, captivated. Finally, once the camera nearly overtakes him, he reaches up, his hands going towards an unseen object, then we realize he was watching the microwave, and out comes a bag of popped corn, and off he goes, away from the camera's eye.
* Richard Hawkins @ Greene Naftali 508 W 26th St. This big show features a lot of Hawkins telltale studies, and it's sort of up to we, the viewers, to tie in all the elements. The Greek sculpture collages (where Hawkins muses on renderings of posteriors etc), crude triptych collages of Francis Bacon reproductions w/ either David Bowie or Slash (done in a Richard Prince sort of way), the vaguely sexual bright oil paintings and tangentially related 'Dragonfly' collages of fashiony Japanese dudes (funny: one of these spells out "bottom" in katakana; I wonder if that was intentional?).
* Paolo Ventura "Winter Stories" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. The only way I sorted out the scale of these meticulously created carnivalesque C-prints is the one vitrined diorama that accompanies the lot. In fact, you see these prints in a magazine, you might think they're real, and not Ventura's painstakingly rendered, nostalgic world. The study drawings in the side gallery are a nice accompaniment.
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
* Tracey Emin "Only God Knows I'm Good" @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. An extensive show of Emin's scratchy linoprint drawings and 'sewn' works on paper — which are really cool b/c they reference one another, and I have to wonder how hard it was to get the embroidery to so closely resemble her particular handwriting and line style. The art? Sexual, debasing, tongue-in-cheek. And don't miss upstairs, the only way to see the show title, rendered in Emin's handwriting in white-hot neon, like a beacon way up there.
* Teresita Fernandez @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. I really do dig Fernandez's graphite-only show, as the shimmery v. matte 'landscape' reliefs and soft v. rocky wall installation bear a meatier, dirtier aesthetic than her previous slick glass forays.
* Mark Manders @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The Dutch artist's last solo show (his first @ the gallery) was a thorough exercise in dread: windows papered over w/ freaky gibberish 'news', crumbling office-like installations, stolid clay-fired figures. This exhibition continues Manders' telltale unease but w/ a far sparer setup. The monumental set-pieces (w/ wild names like "Livingroom Scene with Enlarged Chairs" and "Large Figure with Book and Fake Dictionaries") often have an entire room to themselves, affording uninterrupted contemplation on such good-vibey stuff like bifurcated epoxy heads, threadbare clay-infused chairs, and iron towers. Proceed w/ caution!
* "The Irreverent Object: European Sculpture from the '60s, '70s and '80s" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. A solid collection of disquietingly beautiful (and sometimes just undeniably disquieting) works from a range of talent. We get the banal ingredients (a lovely look-twice Dieter Roth and several approachable Martin Kippenbergers), the brain-trust (blood-red Lucio Fontana, intriguing Joseph Beuys, epic Louise Bourgeois) and several stunning glassed display boxes from Arman — and I dare you to pick the more disturbing, the assortment of gas masks or the boozy detritus credited to Robert Rauschenberg.
* Kristin Baker "Splitting Twilight" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The energy in Baker's troweled acrylic on PVC panels is palpable as usual, but the subject matter — her 'remixes' of landscape style — is way more my thing. Her signature collage-y, mixed textural technique is in high effect, and she operates across the entire color spectrum like James Rosenquist, but there's a serious depth to these ostensibly 'flat' works that draws you in. One resembles a mashup of Nouveau Soho (cascading prisms of grayscale glass) w/ meteoric blobs of yellow and violet (like the graffiti-covered building across the street from the gallery). Another drifts woozily in a red-tinted tropical landscape amid fat 'palm tree' columns. A third, the dealmaker, is a three-panel study of restless blue waves under a multitonal sunset.
* Eric Fischl "Corrida in Ronda" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Confession: bullfighting is like the furthest from my cup of tea, but I still find Fischl's typically large, center-lit canvases dazzling. Though I did sort of avert my eyes from the more violent lot (there's one solo canvas, at the entryway, feat. just the bull, no toreros, that is quite lovely).
* Marc Quinn "Iris" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. Quinn's massive circular canvases of the namesake eye-related body part harbor the potential of New Age-y-ness, meaning those strange crackling-lightning and bubbling spheres and pseudo-3D computer wallpaper shit circa '02 (you know, 640x480-pixel-sized). But they're nothing like that. In person, and specifically up close, Quinn's deftly rendered irises are incredibly unslick and painterly, which detracts exactly 0% from the work.
* Richard Mosse "The Fall" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Mosse's photojournalist record of his remotest travels, here a series of large C-prints, interrupt the respective snowy, deserted or otherwise forest-laden landscape w/ the carcass of a once-great metal beast. As in, the burned out, bullet-riddled frame of an automobile; the wingless body and nose of a jet, throwing forth its shadow like the maw of a prehistoric predator; the basically decayed wing of an airliner, tattooed w/ several decades' worth of graffiti.
* Blanca Muñoz "The Blue Dance" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Muñoz's lyrical perforated stainless steel sculpture (kissed here and there by mirrored cobalt blue steel) resemble plantlike alien lifeforms. Think visually weightless lilypads or some tropics-dwelling frond basking in the sunlight or wafting gently in a sea current. Even the massive pieces (Muñoz breaks up her sculpture by either small table-top or relief works — which execute especially well — or auto-sized beasts) retain a lightness belying their obviously heavy components, the perforations and screws magnified to extra-large dimensions.
+ Alejandro Corujeira "The Accessible, Dressed in Salts". I detect traces of fairly contemporary Brice Marden in some of Corujeira's wavy line acrylics, though I'm not sure the artist enacts the same sort of fierce attention and loving care that Marden does to his whiplike shapes.
* Kim Nam Pyo "Instant Landscapes" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. You read the gallery checklist just to confirm that Kim's large-scale works are 'just' charcoal drawings and not collages or like horsehair-brushed oils (Daliesque) — as they are so exactingly rendered, every bent tree-branch or bizarro zebra head or Barneys-quality accessory (the light sources on the croc bags and high heels are exquisite). Sure Kim adds faux fur to the lot, usually in the manner of equine tails or crests, but that blends in amid the extremely surreal, beautifully detailed landscapes.
* Liu Ye "Leave Me in the Dark" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. I love Ye's haunting, spare acrylics, which mostly capture a solitary doll-like girl in scenarios worth of Rene Magritte. She might be reading a book or standing, raincoated and w/ luggage but w/ her back turned to the viewer — and suddenly everything is just a bit less familiar. Ye's 'compositions', of bamboo, blocks and drugs, are rendered w/ a scalpel's clarity, but lack the gauzy beauty of his portraiture.
* Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St #3. A deceptively simple show, ostensibly three artists comfortable w/ wall art. But that's such a cop-out! Weiner's hot-pink "LAID OUT FLAT BENT [NOW] THIS WAY TURNED [NOW] THAT WAY (i.e. LOOPED OVER)" grounds the other two, the sunny yellow ruled and wobbly lines from LeWitt's circa-1971 wall piece (in contemporary terms, it looks a bit like Wolfgang Laib's hand-sifted pollen installations) and two very intriguing takes from Sonnier. The noisy one, feat. flickering lights, latex and a motor, feels more typical but the other, a wall-mounted trapezoid of flock w/ string, intrigues in its rawness.
* Bill Viola "Bodies of Light" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Love or loathe Viola, his exhibitions, which tend around watery slo-mo video, draw insane crowds. Like this one, which is total eye-candy (try to NOT be visually arrested by "Incarnation" and "Acceptance", even though they're sort of like being filmed in the shower) but by no means insubstantial. In fact, the "Pneuma" installation (this grainy video on three of four gallery walls) is a super palate cleanser from the fussier shows on the block.
* David Hockney "Paintings 2006-2009" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St + 32 E 57th St. I never thought I'd enjoy a straightforward landscape painting show as much as I enjoyed Hockney's. His renderings of Yorkshire, which mostly involves glades, felled trees and bunches of hawthorne, through various seasons, are magnetizing. The colors are fanciful (purplish roads, orange grass) yet visceral in his capture of the specific lighting. And the depth of these, esp. the woods, stretch for miles away. You know those scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up", when David Hemmings is in the park and all you hear is the sound of the wind through the trees? That's what this exhibition feels like.
* Hiroyuki Nakamura "The Sky Above" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Think of the bad guys from "The Hills Have Eyes", done up in Western duds. Or, if you will, a cross between Kabuki makeup and John Wayne.
* Mike Kelley "Horizontal Tracking Lines" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Goodness, Kelley is a weirdo. His latest show is one heady trip, but it builds on his earlier accomplishments (coital rag-dolls, modified Abstract Expressionism, quirky video) so if you're familiar w/ his trickery, use his reputation to your advantage here. Expect: misshapen canvases bearing crudely rendered cartoonish or pornish figures amid smeared paint — and each of these is mounted on flat-color polychrome panels like massive pixels. Even better: the eponymous installation "Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms", which feat. more polychrome bars and three test-patterened video screens that project, once the click-track ends, random, split-second (and generally hilarious) Youtube clips. Think less his narrative-driven "Day is Done" and more like Luis Gispert's "Pony Show".
* Richard Serra "Blind Spot/Open Ended" @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. A thrilling pas de deux of Cor-Ten giants for W Chelsea. These related massive sculptures play off one another in form and function. "Blind Spot" is the scarier one, for me anyway, as it features odd little sharp right angles as you navigate the shell-like spiral, passing similar structures and you feel like you're walking in circles until suddenly the path truncates in this tight V deep w/in the sculpture. "Open Ended" has two entrance/exits (thankfully), but feels more dynamic in a way, as the sides rush up at you like waves of several-tonne steel as you loop up and cross back.
* Cy Twombly "Eight Sculptures" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. These stately bronzes, each bearing a plywood plinth save one totemic piece, residing on its own 'petrified' trunk, embody a resonating calm and maturity needed in the always-crowded gallery scene. Even in the labyrinthine uptown Gagosian, where such disparate couplings as Jeff Koons and Pablo Picasso are known to collide, you need a show like Twombly's to cut through the mania. That said, my favorite pieces, if pressed, are the two wedding cake-like structures, one neatly dwarfed by its base and the other enlarged to match it. But the entire lot is good and, in the stark gallery space, it feels as though you've stumbled upon something very special (hint: you have).
+ Roger Ballen "Boarding House". A massive exhibition of the photographer's latest b&w series, taken in a three-story occupied warehouse in Johannesburg. His generally idiosyncratic and unsettling portraiture is reduced to seemingly stage-set vignettes: limbs, mouths and the occasional cat moving about blanketed walls. Thing is, though, the 'actors' are all real, meaning they're the impoverished inhabitants of the Boarding House, posing for and interacting w/ Ballen's lens. And there's a strong proper Surrealism in his compositions, too, the stained sculptural busts and figure framing (concealed faces), plus the odd rose or apple, made me think he did his Rene Magritte homework.
* Kaz Oshiro "Setting Sun" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Oshiro takes his trompe l'oeil shaped and painted canvases to glorious heights, mainly in this wicked installation of 'Orange speaker cabinets'. If only Wata (and all of Boris, my fav Japanese stoner-rock trio) were present too! Plus slightly bent abstract canvases and 'rubbish bins'.
+ Robert Ryman. Lots going on w/ these three ostensibly Minimalist white paintings, from the late '60s and early '70s. The two larger canvases feat. a subtle banding and a yellowish tint (one seems to have heavier coats of paint near the bottom), and the smaller canvas has a waxy white chevron pattern, like Ryman taped the thing off to create the effect.
* Dan Flavin "Series and Progressions" @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. A gorgeous, sobering investigation into the Minimalist's core practice of repetition and color. Begin w/ the jewel-box "alternating pink and 'gold'" at 519, a three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods. Note the fuzzy-edged vibrations, how pairing the two colors turn the pinks whitish and the yellows lemony. In 525 you pass through a series of rooms, from the warm yellow and cherry-red pairings through the shock-saturated blue/reds and shimmering greens, ending on almost a sunrise-like blast of brightness. The seminal all-white "the nominal three (to William of Ockham)" acts as a palate-cleanser before the brilliant cage-like "untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with love and affection"), a white-hot bluish latticework extending across the breadth of 533's space.
* Tony Feher "Blossom" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The show title draws from Feher's latest venture: super-duper big yet ominously feather-light extruded-polystyrene 'fans'.
+ Yoshihiro Suda. Fun thing about Suda's discreet trompe l'oeil wood-carved, hand-painted plants is how, on a rainy day like this past weekend, when people would track like the odd leaf or whatever into the gallery space, you can't quite tell whether that leaf is from outdoors or is intentionally placed there by the artist — his sculpture is THAT realistic.
* Paul McCarthy "White Snow" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A deliciously dirty show of new works from the relentlessly deviant (yet always grandfatherly) artist — at massive 7x10' McCarthy-scale paper collages. Beyond his usual charcoal drawings and scribbly oil-stick, these works incl. tears from exhibition catalogues (Christie's bears sharp notice, esp. extended views of Jeff Koons' shows) and porn mags. Good old Paul! The bizarre titles ("GAP", "Michael Jackson", "100") generally come from some magazine element on the massive works and obscurely reference the on-page action. Though by the time we get to "Inside Her Ordeal", a personal fave, the aforementioned dense maelstroms wash away into a rather spare piece, w/ a glassy eyed Snow grinning out into oblivion.
* Richard Hamilton: Selected Prints from the Collection, 1970-2005 @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). You might know British artist Hamilton from his tiny mid-'50s collage "Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?", which more or less ushered in Pop Art. Guess what! That was over five decades ago and he is STILL doing his thing, collage, intaglio, digital techniques, even a series based 'round James Joyce's "Ulysses". This curated selection of two dozen works should bring us up to date w/ Hamilton's master printmaking.
* "Rebels of the Neon God" (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992) screening @ BAM / 30 Lafayette, Ft Greene (D/M/NR to Pacific, 23/45/Q to Atlantic), 6:50/9:15p. The Taiwanese New Wave pioneer's debut film bears little resemblance to his later, sparser, tenser, dialogue-light works, but the ingredients for them are all in place here. Like: the enigmatic youthful lead Lee Kang-sheng, the friction b/w family, independence and love, and the hypnotic, techno-fueled pulse of the night city.
THURSDAY
* Small Black DJ set @ Insound Design Store / 303 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. So Insound is hosting a popup store for the holidays w/ special DJs and free booze every night for five nights. This is night one: 2009's glo-fi trend summed up in one impossibly wicked duo. Thank you, Insound, for deciding my Thursday night plans for me!
* "The Chelsea Girls" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1966) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. I may have seen Warhol's notorious dual-projection, lengthy psych-trip more times than anyone you know. And I want to see it again: Mary Wonorov and Ingrid Superstar mugging for the camera, Ondine's equally harsh and honeyed prosthelytizing, and Nico's tearful face against carousel lights.
* Future Islands @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Baltimore's Future Islands may sound a bit soft & fuzzy on album, but these guys rock exceedingly hard live. Their remix EP "Post Office Wave Chapel" release party also includes sets by glitterfied Pictureplane (playing a few dates in NYC) and Brooklyn's slightly trashy Javelin, who each contributed a remix.
* Pterodactyl @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$8. Been too long since I've experienced Pterodactyl's white-hot frenzy, which always manages to be melodic despite the shrill guitars and trundling drums. w/ Julianna Barwick.
* Robert Longo, David Malijkovic, John Miller "Ongoing Projects" @ Metro Pictures / 519 W 24th St. Newly realized works from the respective artists' careers, incl. new prints from Longo's '70s-era 'Men in the Cities', a slew of photography from Miller's 'Middle of the Day' project', and Malijkovic's newest film 'Out of Projection'.
* "5000 Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection" @ Metropolitan Museum of Art / 1000 5th Ave (456 to 86th St). If you've not checked out the sensational samurai armor and armaments special exhibition, here's another tasty, albeit peaceful, bijoux. The Met unveils acquisitions of screen paintings, Buddhist scrolls, sliding door panels, sculptures, all sorts of stuff spanning from arcane times to the nineteenth century.
* Hélio Oiticica "Drawings 1954-1958" @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. A rare showing of the Brazilian artist's minimalist works on paper.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / 149 7th St, Gowanus (F/G/R to 9th St/4th Ave), $15 day or $40 pass (available @ the door Thursday or
FRIDAY
* Tanlines + Future Islands @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle, L to Jefferson), 8p. Pick your poison. If you can't make DbA on Thursday and really, really want to see Future Islands (and Pictureplane), check out this extra lo-fi dance night, headlined by Brooklyn's always-reliable ketamine-house-inflected Tanlines.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / (see info above). Night two is HOT, as nullsleep (aka like the best known 8-bit musician, IMO) has a set. He is matched by duo Starscream and by Berlin's Patric C, whose breakcore is a bit like harsh Aphex Twin filtered through his NES.
SATURDAY
* Blank Dogs @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. In case you missed Blank Dogs' wall-of-sound set from last Sunday in Wsburg, you've got another great opportunity to lose yourself in their glammy distortion.
* The Babies + Gary War @ Ash's Place / 234 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. Brooklyn swingy-indie The Babies (Cassie Ramone from Vivian Girls, plus guys from Woods and Bossy) headline a pretty dope show of hot left-of-margin bands, incl. underwater Joy Division-ish Gary War and stripped-down surf duet Coasting.
* Blip Festival 2009 @ Bell House / (see info above). Big closing night, thanks to NYC's Bubblyfish (I caught her soulful Gameboy set back in 2007) w/ Blip Festival co-curator Bit Shifter and more.
SUNDAY
* The Pains of Being Pure at Heart DJ set @ Insound Design Store / 303 Grand St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 7p/FREE. So Insound is hosting a popup store for the holidays w/ special DJs and free booze every night for five nights. This is night four: Brooklyn's finest twee-rockers on deck. Thank you, Insound, for deciding my Sunday night plans for me!
* Post-Blip Showcase @ Public Assembly / 70 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 10p/$5. Or if you either can't be bothered to trek out to Gowanus-area Brooklyn and drop $15 on a night of hot 8-bit beats... Honestly this party sounds super cool, and super hard, thanks to headliners Anamanaguchi, the finest NES-punksters I know. w/ Starpause, IAYD, and visuals by the inexhaustible Jean Y. Kim.
MONDAY
* Knight School + Christmas Lights (aka Bright Lights) @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$2. A two-dollar (!!) holiday show at Cake Shop, headlined by Brooklyn's Knight School, playing that brand of lo-fi catchy pop and playing it well. Nice.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Zhang Huan "Neither Coming Nor Going" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Zhang's second solo show w/ the gallery is an overall calmer affair than last year's, though it maintains two of his signature recurring elements: monumental scale and ash. This time both figure into one piece, the 18'-tall "Rulai", an ash Buddha imbued w/ relics, copper dishes and unburned joss sticks. It's actually a few feet taller than his cowhide-composed "Giant No. 3", the woman-and-child sculpture from last year's show, but — and maybe this is b/c the subject matter is a Buddha — this compact-ash sculpture just seems more serene, blending in w/ the architecture and beams of the gallery instead of competing w/ it as a huge installation. Framing "Rulai" are Zhang's new large-scale ink and feather paintings on handmade mulberry paper, depictions of deer and landscapes in the manner of 17th c. calligrapher Bada Shanren and 7th c. Tang Dynasty tome "Tui Bei Tu". My final assessment: last year's debut grabbed our attention. This year's solidifies Zhang's oeuvre in our conscious.
* "Merlin James, Arturo Herrera, Matt Connors "Building on a Cliff" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. A benefit of writing this LIST is my totally subjective approach to the art I cover. And though this is billed as a group show, I suggest you take it as James' highly experimental investigation and variation on landscape painting — leave it as that, a solo show, James', w/ Herrera's and Connors' respective works on the side for amusement. Hell, there's a great short film from Singapore video artist Sherman Ong in the back gallery, just to REALLY mix things up. But if you focus on this 'group show' as James' solo show, and take the layout in a clockwise fashion by heading straight back into the big main gallery space and then follow the wall (and smaller galleries) towards the entrance, tracing James' canvases of innocuous country vistas that suddenly transform into acrylic on translucent screens or jute fabric (like the show's titular work, recalling Joan Miro), literally throwing the traditional medium oil-on-canvas out the window, then returning to it @ the end — only by this point you'll second guess yourself and think the canvas is actually stretched vinyl, like some of his other pieces — and you've just experienced QUITE a show.
* Brian Calvin "Head" @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Canvas-filling heads of long-haired girls, simply situated against beach scenes or patterned wallpaper, sometimes clutching cans of beer.
* Jon Pylypchuk "The War" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. OK picture the puppet-characters from a classic dark-hearted Jim Henson film, or perhaps better yet anything by Tim Burton. Now cross those w/ the tribal masks from the Met's Oceanic Arts dept, only cobble 'em together out of hardware store materials. Illuminate 'em all how you see fit, either incandescent or flickery fire bulbs. Actually, Pylypchuk's show is sort of like that Amex "don't take chances, take charge" commercial, where it's like a series of sad faces and happy faces. I am slightly embarrassed to even know this.
* Anthony McCall "Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence)" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. McCall's yummy 'solid light' works are so pure and fascinating. The notion seems entirely simple: several beams of white light projected in a dark room, but when you watch the beams create ever-morphing elliptical forms on the wall, like greatly magnified amoebas, and THEN you stand inside the smoky beams...let's just call it a very warm, secure, personal experience. 'Transcendent', perhaps.
* Audrey Kawasaki "Hajimari – a prelude" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. The gorg solo debut from the young NYC-based artist, feat. works on paper and sumptuous oils and graphite on wood panels. This is Kawasaki's strongest suit: she exercises a fair level of restraint w/ the paint, allowing the grain and natural scars and imperfections of the wood shine through her fantastical, fairytale-like, and Japanese-inspired renderings of young women. She incorporates backgrounds into her portraits, too, ranging from subtle color gradations that seem to follow the wood's natural pigments to lush rooms and natural environments.
+ James Marshall (Dalek) "And There Was War in Heaven". A hard-edged slew of geometric bijoux to accompany Kawasaki's lovingly organic exhibition. Dalek's works are sort of like late-period Al Held (in palette and technique, but only straight lines) crossed w/ Imagination Station.
* Tim Gardner @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Lone figures in generally recognizable environments (UWS near the Lincoln Center, Central Park, Lake Louise which I grossly mistook for the Grand Canyon, oops...), and sometimes small groups, each rendered like soft photographs in watercolor.
* Sharon Lockhart "Lunch Break" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. Really nice exhibition. Lockhart frames an ironworkers' union via indirect means: C-prints focused on their lunchboxes (check the woven-basket one), snack-food commons areas, and this super slo-mo tracking shot of the men at rest. This is executed quite well: we watch the camera slowly, slowwwwly move up this corridor to the din of heavy machinery, passing the workers' lockers and the odd boxy machine, and you probably can't help but gaze at this flanneled dude standing in the middle of the corridor, staring up at something. The guys around him move in and out of frame (albeit very slowly), rustling newspapers or drinking coffee, but this guy stands transfixed, captivated. Finally, once the camera nearly overtakes him, he reaches up, his hands going towards an unseen object, then we realize he was watching the microwave, and out comes a bag of popped corn, and off he goes, away from the camera's eye.
* Richard Hawkins @ Greene Naftali 508 W 26th St. This big show features a lot of Hawkins telltale studies, and it's sort of up to we, the viewers, to tie in all the elements. The Greek sculpture collages (where Hawkins muses on renderings of posteriors etc), crude triptych collages of Francis Bacon reproductions w/ either David Bowie or Slash (done in a Richard Prince sort of way), the vaguely sexual bright oil paintings and tangentially related 'Dragonfly' collages of fashiony Japanese dudes (funny: one of these spells out "bottom" in katakana; I wonder if that was intentional?).
* Paolo Ventura "Winter Stories" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. The only way I sorted out the scale of these meticulously created carnivalesque C-prints is the one vitrined diorama that accompanies the lot. In fact, you see these prints in a magazine, you might think they're real, and not Ventura's painstakingly rendered, nostalgic world. The study drawings in the side gallery are a nice accompaniment.
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
* Tracey Emin "Only God Knows I'm Good" @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. An extensive show of Emin's scratchy linoprint drawings and 'sewn' works on paper — which are really cool b/c they reference one another, and I have to wonder how hard it was to get the embroidery to so closely resemble her particular handwriting and line style. The art? Sexual, debasing, tongue-in-cheek. And don't miss upstairs, the only way to see the show title, rendered in Emin's handwriting in white-hot neon, like a beacon way up there.
* Teresita Fernandez @ Lehmann Maupin / 540 W 26th St. I really do dig Fernandez's graphite-only show, as the shimmery v. matte 'landscape' reliefs and soft v. rocky wall installation bear a meatier, dirtier aesthetic than her previous slick glass forays.
* Mark Manders @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery / 521 W 21st St. The Dutch artist's last solo show (his first @ the gallery) was a thorough exercise in dread: windows papered over w/ freaky gibberish 'news', crumbling office-like installations, stolid clay-fired figures. This exhibition continues Manders' telltale unease but w/ a far sparer setup. The monumental set-pieces (w/ wild names like "Livingroom Scene with Enlarged Chairs" and "Large Figure with Book and Fake Dictionaries") often have an entire room to themselves, affording uninterrupted contemplation on such good-vibey stuff like bifurcated epoxy heads, threadbare clay-infused chairs, and iron towers. Proceed w/ caution!
* "The Irreverent Object: European Sculpture from the '60s, '70s and '80s" @ Luhring Augustine / 531 W 24th St. A solid collection of disquietingly beautiful (and sometimes just undeniably disquieting) works from a range of talent. We get the banal ingredients (a lovely look-twice Dieter Roth and several approachable Martin Kippenbergers), the brain-trust (blood-red Lucio Fontana, intriguing Joseph Beuys, epic Louise Bourgeois) and several stunning glassed display boxes from Arman — and I dare you to pick the more disturbing, the assortment of gas masks or the boozy detritus credited to Robert Rauschenberg.
* Kristin Baker "Splitting Twilight" @ Deitch / 18 Wooster St. The energy in Baker's troweled acrylic on PVC panels is palpable as usual, but the subject matter — her 'remixes' of landscape style — is way more my thing. Her signature collage-y, mixed textural technique is in high effect, and she operates across the entire color spectrum like James Rosenquist, but there's a serious depth to these ostensibly 'flat' works that draws you in. One resembles a mashup of Nouveau Soho (cascading prisms of grayscale glass) w/ meteoric blobs of yellow and violet (like the graffiti-covered building across the street from the gallery). Another drifts woozily in a red-tinted tropical landscape amid fat 'palm tree' columns. A third, the dealmaker, is a three-panel study of restless blue waves under a multitonal sunset.
* Eric Fischl "Corrida in Ronda" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 541 W 24th St. Confession: bullfighting is like the furthest from my cup of tea, but I still find Fischl's typically large, center-lit canvases dazzling. Though I did sort of avert my eyes from the more violent lot (there's one solo canvas, at the entryway, feat. just the bull, no toreros, that is quite lovely).
* Marc Quinn "Iris" @ Mary Boone Gallery / 745 5th Ave. Quinn's massive circular canvases of the namesake eye-related body part harbor the potential of New Age-y-ness, meaning those strange crackling-lightning and bubbling spheres and pseudo-3D computer wallpaper shit circa '02 (you know, 640x480-pixel-sized). But they're nothing like that. In person, and specifically up close, Quinn's deftly rendered irises are incredibly unslick and painterly, which detracts exactly 0% from the work.
* Richard Mosse "The Fall" @ Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th St. Mosse's photojournalist record of his remotest travels, here a series of large C-prints, interrupt the respective snowy, deserted or otherwise forest-laden landscape w/ the carcass of a once-great metal beast. As in, the burned out, bullet-riddled frame of an automobile; the wingless body and nose of a jet, throwing forth its shadow like the maw of a prehistoric predator; the basically decayed wing of an airliner, tattooed w/ several decades' worth of graffiti.
* Blanca Muñoz "The Blue Dance" @ Marlborough Chelsea / 545 W 25th St. Muñoz's lyrical perforated stainless steel sculpture (kissed here and there by mirrored cobalt blue steel) resemble plantlike alien lifeforms. Think visually weightless lilypads or some tropics-dwelling frond basking in the sunlight or wafting gently in a sea current. Even the massive pieces (Muñoz breaks up her sculpture by either small table-top or relief works — which execute especially well — or auto-sized beasts) retain a lightness belying their obviously heavy components, the perforations and screws magnified to extra-large dimensions.
+ Alejandro Corujeira "The Accessible, Dressed in Salts". I detect traces of fairly contemporary Brice Marden in some of Corujeira's wavy line acrylics, though I'm not sure the artist enacts the same sort of fierce attention and loving care that Marden does to his whiplike shapes.
* Kim Nam Pyo "Instant Landscapes" @ Gana NY / 568 W 25th St. You read the gallery checklist just to confirm that Kim's large-scale works are 'just' charcoal drawings and not collages or like horsehair-brushed oils (Daliesque) — as they are so exactingly rendered, every bent tree-branch or bizarro zebra head or Barneys-quality accessory (the light sources on the croc bags and high heels are exquisite). Sure Kim adds faux fur to the lot, usually in the manner of equine tails or crests, but that blends in amid the extremely surreal, beautifully detailed landscapes.
* Liu Ye "Leave Me in the Dark" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. I love Ye's haunting, spare acrylics, which mostly capture a solitary doll-like girl in scenarios worth of Rene Magritte. She might be reading a book or standing, raincoated and w/ luggage but w/ her back turned to the viewer — and suddenly everything is just a bit less familiar. Ye's 'compositions', of bamboo, blocks and drugs, are rendered w/ a scalpel's clarity, but lack the gauzy beauty of his portraiture.
* Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St #3. A deceptively simple show, ostensibly three artists comfortable w/ wall art. But that's such a cop-out! Weiner's hot-pink "LAID OUT FLAT BENT [NOW] THIS WAY TURNED [NOW] THAT WAY (i.e. LOOPED OVER)" grounds the other two, the sunny yellow ruled and wobbly lines from LeWitt's circa-1971 wall piece (in contemporary terms, it looks a bit like Wolfgang Laib's hand-sifted pollen installations) and two very intriguing takes from Sonnier. The noisy one, feat. flickering lights, latex and a motor, feels more typical but the other, a wall-mounted trapezoid of flock w/ string, intrigues in its rawness.
* Bill Viola "Bodies of Light" @ James Cohan Gallery / 533 W 26th St. Love or loathe Viola, his exhibitions, which tend around watery slo-mo video, draw insane crowds. Like this one, which is total eye-candy (try to NOT be visually arrested by "Incarnation" and "Acceptance", even though they're sort of like being filmed in the shower) but by no means insubstantial. In fact, the "Pneuma" installation (this grainy video on three of four gallery walls) is a super palate cleanser from the fussier shows on the block.
* David Hockney "Paintings 2006-2009" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St + 32 E 57th St. I never thought I'd enjoy a straightforward landscape painting show as much as I enjoyed Hockney's. His renderings of Yorkshire, which mostly involves glades, felled trees and bunches of hawthorne, through various seasons, are magnetizing. The colors are fanciful (purplish roads, orange grass) yet visceral in his capture of the specific lighting. And the depth of these, esp. the woods, stretch for miles away. You know those scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up", when David Hemmings is in the park and all you hear is the sound of the wind through the trees? That's what this exhibition feels like.
* Hiroyuki Nakamura "The Sky Above" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Think of the bad guys from "The Hills Have Eyes", done up in Western duds. Or, if you will, a cross between Kabuki makeup and John Wayne.
* Mike Kelley "Horizontal Tracking Lines" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Goodness, Kelley is a weirdo. His latest show is one heady trip, but it builds on his earlier accomplishments (coital rag-dolls, modified Abstract Expressionism, quirky video) so if you're familiar w/ his trickery, use his reputation to your advantage here. Expect: misshapen canvases bearing crudely rendered cartoonish or pornish figures amid smeared paint — and each of these is mounted on flat-color polychrome panels like massive pixels. Even better: the eponymous installation "Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms", which feat. more polychrome bars and three test-patterened video screens that project, once the click-track ends, random, split-second (and generally hilarious) Youtube clips. Think less his narrative-driven "Day is Done" and more like Luis Gispert's "Pony Show".
* Richard Serra "Blind Spot/Open Ended" @ Gagosian / 522 W 21st St. A thrilling pas de deux of Cor-Ten giants for W Chelsea. These related massive sculptures play off one another in form and function. "Blind Spot" is the scarier one, for me anyway, as it features odd little sharp right angles as you navigate the shell-like spiral, passing similar structures and you feel like you're walking in circles until suddenly the path truncates in this tight V deep w/in the sculpture. "Open Ended" has two entrance/exits (thankfully), but feels more dynamic in a way, as the sides rush up at you like waves of several-tonne steel as you loop up and cross back.
* Cy Twombly "Eight Sculptures" @ Gagosian / 980 Madison Ave. These stately bronzes, each bearing a plywood plinth save one totemic piece, residing on its own 'petrified' trunk, embody a resonating calm and maturity needed in the always-crowded gallery scene. Even in the labyrinthine uptown Gagosian, where such disparate couplings as Jeff Koons and Pablo Picasso are known to collide, you need a show like Twombly's to cut through the mania. That said, my favorite pieces, if pressed, are the two wedding cake-like structures, one neatly dwarfed by its base and the other enlarged to match it. But the entire lot is good and, in the stark gallery space, it feels as though you've stumbled upon something very special (hint: you have).
+ Roger Ballen "Boarding House". A massive exhibition of the photographer's latest b&w series, taken in a three-story occupied warehouse in Johannesburg. His generally idiosyncratic and unsettling portraiture is reduced to seemingly stage-set vignettes: limbs, mouths and the occasional cat moving about blanketed walls. Thing is, though, the 'actors' are all real, meaning they're the impoverished inhabitants of the Boarding House, posing for and interacting w/ Ballen's lens. And there's a strong proper Surrealism in his compositions, too, the stained sculptural busts and figure framing (concealed faces), plus the odd rose or apple, made me think he did his Rene Magritte homework.
* Kaz Oshiro "Setting Sun" @ Yvon Lambert / 550 W 21st St. Oshiro takes his trompe l'oeil shaped and painted canvases to glorious heights, mainly in this wicked installation of 'Orange speaker cabinets'. If only Wata (and all of Boris, my fav Japanese stoner-rock trio) were present too! Plus slightly bent abstract canvases and 'rubbish bins'.
+ Robert Ryman. Lots going on w/ these three ostensibly Minimalist white paintings, from the late '60s and early '70s. The two larger canvases feat. a subtle banding and a yellowish tint (one seems to have heavier coats of paint near the bottom), and the smaller canvas has a waxy white chevron pattern, like Ryman taped the thing off to create the effect.
* Dan Flavin "Series and Progressions" @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. A gorgeous, sobering investigation into the Minimalist's core practice of repetition and color. Begin w/ the jewel-box "alternating pink and 'gold'" at 519, a three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods. Note the fuzzy-edged vibrations, how pairing the two colors turn the pinks whitish and the yellows lemony. In 525 you pass through a series of rooms, from the warm yellow and cherry-red pairings through the shock-saturated blue/reds and shimmering greens, ending on almost a sunrise-like blast of brightness. The seminal all-white "the nominal three (to William of Ockham)" acts as a palate-cleanser before the brilliant cage-like "untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with love and affection"), a white-hot bluish latticework extending across the breadth of 533's space.
* Tony Feher "Blossom" @ D'Amelio Terras / 525 W 22nd St. The show title draws from Feher's latest venture: super-duper big yet ominously feather-light extruded-polystyrene 'fans'.
+ Yoshihiro Suda. Fun thing about Suda's discreet trompe l'oeil wood-carved, hand-painted plants is how, on a rainy day like this past weekend, when people would track like the odd leaf or whatever into the gallery space, you can't quite tell whether that leaf is from outdoors or is intentionally placed there by the artist — his sculpture is THAT realistic.
* Paul McCarthy "White Snow" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A deliciously dirty show of new works from the relentlessly deviant (yet always grandfatherly) artist — at massive 7x10' McCarthy-scale paper collages. Beyond his usual charcoal drawings and scribbly oil-stick, these works incl. tears from exhibition catalogues (Christie's bears sharp notice, esp. extended views of Jeff Koons' shows) and porn mags. Good old Paul! The bizarre titles ("GAP", "Michael Jackson", "100") generally come from some magazine element on the massive works and obscurely reference the on-page action. Though by the time we get to "Inside Her Ordeal", a personal fave, the aforementioned dense maelstroms wash away into a rather spare piece, w/ a glassy eyed Snow grinning out into oblivion.
Friday, December 11, 2009
My TOP TEN LIST-worthy cultural events of 2009
It's that time of year when seemingly every publication/blog, art- and otherwise, does a 'best-of', 'year-end', 'top ten' list. Artforum did like a thousand of these. And so can I. While my writing is far more rudimentary than what you may read elsewhere, you can rest assured it is my highly subjective, slang-riddled, personally-experienced opinion. And with that:
My TOP TEN LIST-worthy cultural events of 2009 (in chronological order, b/c further ranking would be too masochistic)
1. Josh Smith "Currents" @ Luhring Augustine
What I said then:
02222009: Noise noise noise. JOSH SMITH! Whole lot of pixellated/abstracted palette canvases + superflat collages (60x48" + 48x36" respectively) jammed in here. JOSH SMITH! Nature, dragons, fish, fauna, the artist's own bloody name scrawled/hidden amid the noise. JOSH SMITH! What the hell is going down here, exactly, + why do I dig it so much? JOSH SMITH! Is this like the #1 show in W Chelsea now, as Christopher Wool's was (@ this same gallery) last year? JOSH SMITH! Yes, quite, very well could be.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Check Smith's site. I dare you. Peruse the 81+ pages of paintings (just paintings!, not even collages, prints, drawings etc). The man is an animal! He's also the slightly older, though still 'younger than Jesus', artist, who anchored an otherwise flighty eponymous inaugural triennial @ the New Museum (unlike Holland Carter and lots of bloggers, I did NOT care for Ryan Trecartin's fussy, meth-lab-chic installation cut w/ Youtube-quality video). He also enjoyed a very good show at Luhring Augustine. His stuff is all sort of samesies, in categories of smeared abstract paintings and superflat mixed media 'collages', yet each element is totally unique. Smith's style is industrial in the manner of printmaking, but his hand is obvious in each work (as is his name, oftentimes, which is why that echoes so much in my original writing).
2. "Shinjuku Ecstasy: Independent Films from the Art Theatre Guild of Japan" @ Japan Society
What I said then:
02222009: As in, Japanese New Wave cinema. What, you didn't realize Japan had a New Wave film period? Have you read Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"? Or for that matter, to get more visceral, Ryu Murakami's "Almost Transparent Blue" (for more sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll)? Yes, there was indeed La Nouvelle Vague in Nippon, w/ such auteurs as Shuji Terayama, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima — and 12 of the iconic films from that period (like mid-'60s to early '70s) are screening here, once each, through Mar 1. 12 films. One screening per. Not like Netflix-able either. Will they sell out? What do you think.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
My first full-out exposure to Japanese New Wave cinema was a doozy. I wish these bijoux weren't so damned limited! Basically we had like one chance each to see these rare beauties, like Shuji Terayama's genre-blasting barn-burner "Throw Away Your Books, Let's Go into the Street" (think sort of JLG's "Two Or Three Things I Know About Her"), like Kazuo Kuroki's haunting "Silence Has No Wings", like Hiroshi Teshigahara's super trippy, stark "Pitfall", which if you thought "Woman of the Dunes" was claustrophobic and bleak, you haven't seen the 1/2 of it. Point being: each of these films, and their directors, follow the art-house theme of experimentation, controversy and innovation, but each stands on its own as a unique voice in the movement. If Akira Kurosawa's period dramas don't grab you, and you think Nagisa Oshima's the only '60s-period envelope-pusher, take another look.
3. Jenny Holzer "PROTECT PROTECT" @ Whitney Museum
What I said then:
03222009: Holzer is a true poet-artist and her idiomatic, punctuation-less phrases resonate stronger now than ever. The fact that some of the words in this mid-career retrospective (or whatever you want to call it) originated in '77, or like during the Reagan administration, only confirms their presence and viability when discussing the Iraqi wars and contemporary society. This awesome exhibit also works really well b/c the gallery gave it some breathing room, space for the electronic LED signs to flow their respective texts and emit their respective light (coolly threatening, warmly enchanting, hot and cautionary). Which is what I always thought the Lawrence Weiner career retrospective needed. I loved that the Whitney did it but it always felt way too crammed and chaotic for my liking. Not Holzer's, it's perfect. Mind you, there are "only" eight LED pieces on display across the fourth floor gallery space, plus a bunch of Holzer's signature Warhol-like blowups and silkscreened de-classified U.S. military documents from the latest Iraq war, her "redaction paintings". The first new LED piece, "For Chicago", greets you like a shimmering orange field soon as you step off the lift, or climb the stairs to the exhibit — the LED panels are incredibly skinny and flattish and level w/ the floor, so it's like the floor itself is glowing. Then the deluge of words begins. "Green Purple Cross" and "Blue Cross" is the one instance where the museum paired two pieces together, and I think it works in this case, the one floating above the other in a cross-cut pattern in a corner, the words "I cannot stand it" flowing by as the walls light up cool blue and green. The massive "Monument" against the other wall is like a NASDAQ ticker on cocaine, whole lines of type overlapping one another in a riot of greens, reds and purples across the cylindrical tower. The room of redaction paintings is a palate cleanser and a chance to relax the eyes, but your senses are probably hyperaware now (perhaps Holzer's intent) so you can't help but read the type of the blown-up military docs even closer, even the parts blacked out or otherwise obscured, testimonials of Iraqi prisoners on their arrests, autopsy reports during detainment. Some are so blacked- or whited-out they become minimalist art — albeit creepy as that sounds — like a drawing by Barry Le Va or Ellsworth Kelly. The stair-step LED "Red Yellow Looming" and the white hot "Thorax" echo the words of the redaction paintings, while the vicious "Purple" — this long floor-to-wall cylinder — spills out overlapping interrogations machinelike, almost to the point of obscurity. But you'll catch yourself unable to pull away as you latch onto a word or phrase, a detainee's answers to his questioner whether he was fed today, or beaten.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
The Whitney struck that fine balance b/w informed elegance and intellectually rich installation in Holzer's fine retrospective. Each piece had a wealth of space to interact w/ the air and the viewers, so it didn't feel like info/stimulus overload like Lawrence Weiner's fine, overdue retrospective two years ago. Nor did it come off as stretched thin and precious, like Roni Horn's beautiful, but very quiet, exhibition. And the art: but no one can grab you like Holzer's scrolling LED signs, and just when you think you've seen it all she drops one on the floor like a shimmering carpet of prose. And the actual words, many of it military-related, could not be more timely and relevant.
4. Sophie Calle "Take Care of Yourself" @ Paula Cooper Gallery
What I said then:
04262009: An absolutely brilliant show that debuted at the 2007 Venice Biennial, centered around a breakup email Calle received. The artist took the letter to over 100 women of various disciplines, backgrounds and ages and they systematically take it apart and respond to this Mr. X. The gallery is filled with typographically diverse responses from fiction writers, justices, schoolteachers, teenagers, philosophers, artists, mothers, scientists with (self?) portraits of the responders and video. It helps if you know French but the show is so visually intriguing as it is that you'll get the gist of most of it. And for additional help Calle enlisted a translator's response, so you can read the bastard's original email in translated English.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Calle's installation was, visually, incredibly appealing — and I think this goes for all sorts of backgrounds. Mine as a graphic designer, I was attracted to the typography and the way the texts reflected the hundred women subjects and their respective life paths. The proliferation of French did not dissuade from the clear, necessarily diverse message of tactile support to the jilted artist. You left Calle's show feeling some of what she felt, and what these women felt for her, Calle's asinine ex-beau, and the general situation.
5. Charles Ray "Early Sculptures" @ Matthew Marks Gallery
What I said then:
05162009: Lots going on in this nearly empty room, courtesy of three of the artist's vintage seldom-exhibited '80s sculpture. "Spinning Floor", a rotating floor tile, is the most apparently approachable, though I have to wonder what would happen if you stepped on it, I mean there was no like caution tape surrounding the spinning tile nor a gallery staffer stationed nearby. "Moving Wires" is a little freaky and a little funny, two long wires move in and out of the wall at like chest-height @ varying speeds. And though it's mechanized it doesn't FEEL mechanized, in person, due to the sort of chancey movement of each wire, like there's somebody stationed behind the wall actually pulling them manually. Now "Ink Line" is the coolest and harbors the most risk, and by risk I mean inevitability for a huge mess. This 'sculpture' appears, in photos and intriguingly in person, at first, as a long black string extending from ceiling to floor, but that's where the staticness ceases. Let your other senses go to work, as in smell: there's like a strong odor of ink when you first enter the gallery, even though this piece is like way off to one side, and hearing: you don't even need to be right up on this one to hear the trickling stream of ink from point A to point B. That's a live cascade of black fluid coming from a dime-sized hole in the ceiling, pouring into a similar-sized hole in the floor, and if you look close you'll detect fluctuations in the stream. This stuff is REAL, and no need to use your remaining two senses to test "Ink Line"s realism, like grab at it and the results will mimic the poor fools who slapped the 'top' of Ray's "Ink Box" and realized the piece was like brimming w/ ink. Oops.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Three delicious rare 'interactive' sculptures from the constantly status-quo-defying artist. You had to experience this w/ your five senses, take in the sharp odor from "Ink Line" (like a gas station) and the subtle sounds coming from the same and "Spinning Floor". In fact, an empty room w/ just "Ink Line" would have sufficed, as this piece, in its debut display, had so much going on, from the subsurface gurgling noises of the ink pooling somewhere before the floor to the whole mechanics of installing the thing, a shimmering black stream flowing from way up in point A to way down in point B. The freaky "Moving Wires", w/ its seemingly random timing and propensity to surprise, especially if you approach the thing dead on and don't catch the gleaming wires, was a playful third. No other sculpture this year, in my opinion, so elegantly stacked up to Ray's three oldies.
6. "Twee as Fuck" concert @ Cake Shop
What I said then:
06212009: Oh my, this is going to be singularly big like a solar eclipse. Brooklyn's indie heavyweights The Stilts and The Pains together at last, tucked away in a crowded basement on the LES beneath a vegan-friendly coffee shop. Let's do a role-by-role comparison w/ caUSE co-MOTION, just to psych ourselves up. Best vocalist? If i'm feeling seriously moody, Brad's (Stilts) tongue-in-cheek deadpan rules, but it's a win b/w the Kip/Peggy (Pains) earnest harmonizing over Arno's (caUSE) nasally delivery. Guitar? J.B. (Stilts) can shred and Kip (Pains) rocks out, but Alex's (caUSE) jangly surf riffs are pretty neat-o. Bass? Liam (caUSE) thrashes and Alex (Pains) pummels, yet Andy's (Stilts) melodic basslines remind me of Mickey Finn. Keys? This is b/w Kyle (Stilts) and Peggy (Pains) b/c caUSE co-MOTION don't have a keyboard player, so sorry Kyle, but Peggy wins this by a mile. Drummer? This is a tie: Kurt (Pains) adds a machinelike muscularity, Jock (caUSE) pounds quite elaborately on a stripped-down set, but Frankie Rose (Stilts) has speed and 4dexterity on her side, plus she usually drums standing up a la Maureen Tucker. Verdict: MAYJAH.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Easily the best concert I attended in 2009. Everything worked out, from the stress of obtaining advance tix (Cake Shop notably only sells tix at the door except special events, like this one, where I trekked out to sister venue Bruar Falls in Wsburg to nab my seemingly hand-drawn Twee as Fuck ticket from the bartender's envelope; in retrospect I wish I could've kept it, totally scrapbook-worthy) to arriving at the show after my evening Japanese course w/ time to navigate the swelling crowd so I could locate the ideal vantage point for maximum satisfaction. English lads Hatcham Social led the evening, these four floppy-haired blokes w/ hangdogish grins and nonchalant demeanor, but they played the hell out of their instruments (incl the standup drummer), kicking through track after track of Pulp-era proper '90s pop. I slid up to the front-left of the stage to dance to caUSE co-MOTION!, who came close to inciting a twee moshpit. Liam was leaping all over the place, colliding w/ Cake Shop's low ceiling but never losing the groove on his basslines. Arno and Alex played like it wasn't no thang. When Crystal Stilts took the stage, and everyone was sweating by this point, all the lights went out and somebody stage-left used a handheld projector like a spotlight/disco ball, so the Stilts played their trundling, glammed-up Velvet Underground tunes in what turned into one of their older tracks, a "Prismatic Room". So absurdly cool. And everyone lost their minds when The Pains of Being Pure at Heart came on. Peggy reinstated the 'ooh - ooh - ooohhh's that added such exhilaration to "Come Saturday", amid the swirling guitar distortion, and her co-vocalization w/ Kip was on point. And Kip led the band w/ a casual mastery that belied their relative newness to the scene. They played "103" too, which was a teaser of the great tracks to come in the next few months ("Twins", "Higher Than the Stars"). Perfection.
7. New York Asian Film Festival 2009 @ IFC Center + Japan Society
What I said then:
06212009: I am fiend for film festivals, and NYAFF in particular. There's like 40 films this year, running the gamut from the ultra-violent and sexually explicit to the heart-warming and -rending, from serious dramatic/historic pieces to fractured romantic comedy. I mean, we have everything from "Ip Man", the sepia-tinted Hong Kong production based around Bruce Lee's wing chun grandmaster, to the centerpiece presentation, a violent li'l number by Yoshihiro Nishimura descriptively entitled "Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl". And there are special screenings of Korean Short Films, two nights of Japanese Pink Eiga (which translates sort of into 'softcore porn', but it's not quite that), and a special 3+ hr "Tokyo Gore Night" on June 27. Take a deep breath. You can bet this will be dope. If y'r on Facebook, you've probably received a special NYAFF 2009 invite from moi, listing the shows I'm attending (currently about 20) and other juicy info. If y'r not, check out the site for the full schedule and ticket info. And get on this, b/c Asian films are go!!!!!!!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
So the NYAFF is practically a shoe-in for LIST BEST OF-inclusion. Why? B/c it epitomizes what my LIST is all about: the marriage of high art (serious drama/romance like Kim Ki-duk's "Dream" and Nick Chin's "Magazine Gap Road"), high action (Wilson Yip's "Ip Man" and Ryu Seung-wan's "Dachimawa Lee") and high violence/sex/nudity/etc (Yoshihiro Nishimura's "Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl", whose original Japanese title "Kyuuketsu Shoujo tai Shoujo Furanken" is just as wicked, for one). B/c it included Sion Sono's mind-melting magnum opus "Love Exposure", a four-hour treatise on religion, family, cultism and pornography that married Ravel's "Bolero" so wonderfully. B/c it included multiple nights of hard-gore Japanese film, unlike anything you've ever seen (and even if you caught Nishimura's "Tokyo Gore Police" at last year's, trust me they go even further than that). B/c the quieter moments, like Eriko Kitagawa's "Halfway" and Lee Kyeong-mi's "Crush & Blush", really shined. And b/c I'm already beginning to meditate in preparation of next year's no-doubt beyond-awesome festival.
8. Underwater Peoples Records Showcase @ Market Hotel
What I said then:
08252009: Can we say MAYJAH? I am really really into the DC-based Underwater Peoples label, which bears that fuzzy lo-fi brilliance of Brooklyn's Woodsist and Captured Tracks labels but maintains this almost (dare I write it?) 'West Coast' sunniness in their artist roster. Like you can listen to all these bands and you're instantly transported to the beach (Long Beach, in this case, or at least the Rockaways). Their summer showcase is a big HELLO to this late-emerging seasonal weather and comes w/ my strongest recommendation. Come early for guitar-loopy Ducktails (aka Matt from Real Estate) and the singularly fantastic Beach Fossils (and rock the beach!), stay for Alex Beeker & The Freaks (aka Alex from Real Estate), Air Waves and headlined by Jersey's finest indie-rockers Real Estate — heard of them?
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
What a brilliant way to end a humid summer of dope live music! Braving the muggy temps and high percentage of rain and hauling out on the J to Bushwick, to the AC-less Market Hotel above the Mr. Kiwi grocery store next to the elevated line! That was like 10% of the fun, the remainder when to the cheap ticket price and the enormous roster of summer-friendly woozy, surf-rock bands from DC's Underwater Peoples label. I arrived during Big Troubles' set and it was hella loud, garage-rock style, raw but catchy. Ducktails' Matt mesmerized the audience w/ his deceptively simple setup of FX pedals and guitar, like he always does, and we were lulled to like a soporific translucence (perhaps also courtesy of the contact high in the air) before he ended his way too brief set. Liam the Younger surprised w/ a pretty spot-on, dirty cover of Nirvana's "Territorial Pissing". Beach Fossils had everybody dancing; you can't listen to 'em and NOT dance. My first brush w/ Fluffy Lumbers (which got me absolutely hooked on his hook-driven "Cruisers") and Family Portrait (ditto to "Mega Secrets") and Real Estate brought the whole sultry late-summer night to a lovely conclusion.
9. Anselm Reyle "Monochrome Age" @ Gagosian + Takashi Murakami
What I said then:
09292009: Much as I lauded the subtler shows in last week's LIST (Anthony Pearson, Chris Ofili and James Turrell for three), I do love a spectacle. And Reyle, the youngish German neo-Abstract Expressionist, is by definition a spectacle: his oeuvre consists of high-gloss sheen, new-car colors, techno patina and lots of chrome and sharp stuff. This exhibition, a mix of his works throughout the years, is a head-scratcher b/c really I don't know how he pulls off some of this stuff. The monochromes, oil-slick canvases abraded w/ various detritus, are like Max Ernst-style frottage/grattage works on Creatine. The silver metallic bales of 'hay' are fibre-optic styled. That much I get. But the mirrored tower of doom, this multitiered crystal piece that emanates some vague spicy scent through its glowing orifices, that I don't get. Nor the massive crinkly jewel-box, like a large crumpled bit of wrapping paper, that phases through an iridescent spectrum as you pass by it and observe it from different angles — I don't know how the hell he made this one, but it's absolutely gorgeous.
+ Takashi Murakami "Picture of Fate: I am but a Fisherman Who Angles in the Darkness of His MInd". The preceding is just the name of Murakami's one-piece show, viewable in the side room to Reyle's delirious gallery-filling affair. The title of the four-panel Murakami contribution, however, is "A Picture of the Blessed Lion Who Stares at Death", and it's a beauty. Murakami mostly eschews the pop-flowers and cartoony-ness you might best know him by, focusing instead on the mythology of the Karajishi ("China-lion") and its ritual and survival. The sheer detailing of this gigantic piece, the Karajishi and its cubs moving about a human-skull bridge against a patina-rich background (I immediately thought 'blotter paper') is breathtaking.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I'd already fallen in love w/ Reyle's spectrum-conquering eye candy before this sort-of retrospective, but the show cemented by appreciation for the German artist and his kind of neo-Abstract Expressionism. I run short on adjectives for his art: ecstatically colorful, future-perfect shiny, enraptured junk-sculpture, yummy shock-bright bijoux. He's comfortable w/ both multitoned Mylar and paint-coated found objet, w/ neon, mirrors and like sharp adaptations of Piero Manzoni's "Achromes". His art can run as glossily manufactured as Jeff Koons', but it retains a twisted quality signature to Reyle. And Murakami's tasty, patina-drenched "A Picture of the Blessed Lion Who Stares at Death" acted as sort of old-reliable psychedelics to Reyle's designer drugs.
10. Urs Fischer "Marguerite de Ponty" @ New Museum
What I said then:
11242009: It's a safe bet many of us art-lovers (and sometimes-enthusiasts) have been anticipating Fischer's gallery-filling solo show. Maybe for his gleeful irreverence to standing architecture (aka 'investigation of space', as in the floor-razing "You" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise a few years back), maybe for his multitalented mixed medium works (melting candle figures, cast-aluminum 'soft' sculpture, anti-Dada 'readymades'). Lots of scare-quotes here, sorry, but it's necessary. And Fischer's exhibition, of works from the past few years, exceeds in expectation whilst simultaneously lifting his cred as a serious artist. The sole hole here, the advert-spoiler "Noisette", is a motion-sensitive tongue that thrusts itself out a tennis ball-sized wall gash: it's a bit of a raspberry to his naysayers, maybe, but it's playful, innocent, innocuous, and by far the best thing. Start from the 4th fl, amid the towering cast-aluminum abstract forms, and decide for yourself what they mean. Maybe "Ix" is a horse-head (the missing head from Mauricio Cattelan's famous "Untitled"? Or Berlinde de Bruyckere's unsettling taxidermy?), or the stunning "David, the Proprietor" a primeval sea beast lashing up from the ocean's depths, or the eponymous "Marguerite de Ponty" a stately, voluptuous lifeform? The other bits in this room, the Robert Gober-esque (in a terribly surreal way) "The Lock", w/ its truncated subway bench and hovering cake, and the bizarrely-titled "Violent Cappuccino" (more aluminum and paint, in the guise of a skeleton fighting off 'cardboard boxes'), are cool to look at but are recurring characters in Fischer's past works. The 3rd fl is trippy, nearly empty save for the aforementioned "Noisette" and a melting (cast-aluminum again) piano. But the great surprise here is the site-specific environment, the collaborative effort w/ graphic designer Scipio Schneider, an installation where the empty gallery was exhaustively photographed and then reprinted as wall- and ceiling-paper. The result: soft pinks, purples and greens w/ trompe l'oeil shadows, sky-light, and public-safety signs. You need several minutes to really take in the unsettling effect — leave the floor if necessary but come back to see it again. He's done this before (the doubled "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns" environment in Tony Shafrazi Gallery last year, replete w/ Shafrazi 'guards', was a trip), but the sneak-up quality here exceeds the earlier works. The 2nd fl, beginning or preferably the end, is Fischer's new multipart work "Service à la Française", but what this means is dozens of mirrored chrome boxes, silkscreened on all surfaces w/ a single object each: a sofa-sized tennis shoe, a milk-crate-sized Balenciaga strappy heel, a canoe-sized sausage. This piece works so well: it's Fischer having fun again but it's a joy to explore. Check the repetitions: halved red Bartlett pear here, rotting red Bartlett pear there; wax-candle cupcake here, deliciously-rendered chocolate-frosted cupcake (replete w/ sprinkles, naturally) there. The effect of it all, and seeing glimpses of yourself in the mirrors as you dash from one objet d'art to the next, is stimulus-overload, exhilarating, thoroughly recommended.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I summed up Fischer's worthiness above, but then I began noticing the NEW ads for the exhibit. They still include that raspberrying "Noisette" only now the tongue (and surrounding hole-in-wall) are superimposed on a blanked out version of the museum's exterior, shot elevated and from across the street as if a 20' version of the rascally installation was protruding from the wedding cake-tiered white box. Of course this is not the case. The casual viewer will see this ad and laugh, perhaps nervously, and then, interest appropriately piqued, will see the show. The informed viewer, knowledgeable of Fischer's craft and past tomfooleries, will smirk "oh that Urs, up to it again, eh?" all bemused-like, and then they'll see the show. That's all well. But "Noisette" and what it implies (holes in walls, childlike destruction, wagging tongues) is but a mere blip in this fascinating, mature suite of newish works. The space-defying wallpaper on the 3rd floor is evidence alone of this young artist's continued sophistication. The labor-intensive chrome-box installation on the 2nd floor is further proof. Hot stuff.
My TOP TEN LIST-worthy cultural events of 2009 (in chronological order, b/c further ranking would be too masochistic)
1. Josh Smith "Currents" @ Luhring Augustine
What I said then:
02222009: Noise noise noise. JOSH SMITH! Whole lot of pixellated/abstracted palette canvases + superflat collages (60x48" + 48x36" respectively) jammed in here. JOSH SMITH! Nature, dragons, fish, fauna, the artist's own bloody name scrawled/hidden amid the noise. JOSH SMITH! What the hell is going down here, exactly, + why do I dig it so much? JOSH SMITH! Is this like the #1 show in W Chelsea now, as Christopher Wool's was (@ this same gallery) last year? JOSH SMITH! Yes, quite, very well could be.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Check Smith's site. I dare you. Peruse the 81+ pages of paintings (just paintings!, not even collages, prints, drawings etc). The man is an animal! He's also the slightly older, though still 'younger than Jesus', artist, who anchored an otherwise flighty eponymous inaugural triennial @ the New Museum (unlike Holland Carter and lots of bloggers, I did NOT care for Ryan Trecartin's fussy, meth-lab-chic installation cut w/ Youtube-quality video). He also enjoyed a very good show at Luhring Augustine. His stuff is all sort of samesies, in categories of smeared abstract paintings and superflat mixed media 'collages', yet each element is totally unique. Smith's style is industrial in the manner of printmaking, but his hand is obvious in each work (as is his name, oftentimes, which is why that echoes so much in my original writing).
2. "Shinjuku Ecstasy: Independent Films from the Art Theatre Guild of Japan" @ Japan Society
What I said then:
02222009: As in, Japanese New Wave cinema. What, you didn't realize Japan had a New Wave film period? Have you read Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"? Or for that matter, to get more visceral, Ryu Murakami's "Almost Transparent Blue" (for more sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll)? Yes, there was indeed La Nouvelle Vague in Nippon, w/ such auteurs as Shuji Terayama, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima — and 12 of the iconic films from that period (like mid-'60s to early '70s) are screening here, once each, through Mar 1. 12 films. One screening per. Not like Netflix-able either. Will they sell out? What do you think.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
My first full-out exposure to Japanese New Wave cinema was a doozy. I wish these bijoux weren't so damned limited! Basically we had like one chance each to see these rare beauties, like Shuji Terayama's genre-blasting barn-burner "Throw Away Your Books, Let's Go into the Street" (think sort of JLG's "Two Or Three Things I Know About Her"), like Kazuo Kuroki's haunting "Silence Has No Wings", like Hiroshi Teshigahara's super trippy, stark "Pitfall", which if you thought "Woman of the Dunes" was claustrophobic and bleak, you haven't seen the 1/2 of it. Point being: each of these films, and their directors, follow the art-house theme of experimentation, controversy and innovation, but each stands on its own as a unique voice in the movement. If Akira Kurosawa's period dramas don't grab you, and you think Nagisa Oshima's the only '60s-period envelope-pusher, take another look.
3. Jenny Holzer "PROTECT PROTECT" @ Whitney Museum
What I said then:
03222009: Holzer is a true poet-artist and her idiomatic, punctuation-less phrases resonate stronger now than ever. The fact that some of the words in this mid-career retrospective (or whatever you want to call it) originated in '77, or like during the Reagan administration, only confirms their presence and viability when discussing the Iraqi wars and contemporary society. This awesome exhibit also works really well b/c the gallery gave it some breathing room, space for the electronic LED signs to flow their respective texts and emit their respective light (coolly threatening, warmly enchanting, hot and cautionary). Which is what I always thought the Lawrence Weiner career retrospective needed. I loved that the Whitney did it but it always felt way too crammed and chaotic for my liking. Not Holzer's, it's perfect. Mind you, there are "only" eight LED pieces on display across the fourth floor gallery space, plus a bunch of Holzer's signature Warhol-like blowups and silkscreened de-classified U.S. military documents from the latest Iraq war, her "redaction paintings". The first new LED piece, "For Chicago", greets you like a shimmering orange field soon as you step off the lift, or climb the stairs to the exhibit — the LED panels are incredibly skinny and flattish and level w/ the floor, so it's like the floor itself is glowing. Then the deluge of words begins. "Green Purple Cross" and "Blue Cross" is the one instance where the museum paired two pieces together, and I think it works in this case, the one floating above the other in a cross-cut pattern in a corner, the words "I cannot stand it" flowing by as the walls light up cool blue and green. The massive "Monument" against the other wall is like a NASDAQ ticker on cocaine, whole lines of type overlapping one another in a riot of greens, reds and purples across the cylindrical tower. The room of redaction paintings is a palate cleanser and a chance to relax the eyes, but your senses are probably hyperaware now (perhaps Holzer's intent) so you can't help but read the type of the blown-up military docs even closer, even the parts blacked out or otherwise obscured, testimonials of Iraqi prisoners on their arrests, autopsy reports during detainment. Some are so blacked- or whited-out they become minimalist art — albeit creepy as that sounds — like a drawing by Barry Le Va or Ellsworth Kelly. The stair-step LED "Red Yellow Looming" and the white hot "Thorax" echo the words of the redaction paintings, while the vicious "Purple" — this long floor-to-wall cylinder — spills out overlapping interrogations machinelike, almost to the point of obscurity. But you'll catch yourself unable to pull away as you latch onto a word or phrase, a detainee's answers to his questioner whether he was fed today, or beaten.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
The Whitney struck that fine balance b/w informed elegance and intellectually rich installation in Holzer's fine retrospective. Each piece had a wealth of space to interact w/ the air and the viewers, so it didn't feel like info/stimulus overload like Lawrence Weiner's fine, overdue retrospective two years ago. Nor did it come off as stretched thin and precious, like Roni Horn's beautiful, but very quiet, exhibition. And the art: but no one can grab you like Holzer's scrolling LED signs, and just when you think you've seen it all she drops one on the floor like a shimmering carpet of prose. And the actual words, many of it military-related, could not be more timely and relevant.
4. Sophie Calle "Take Care of Yourself" @ Paula Cooper Gallery
What I said then:
04262009: An absolutely brilliant show that debuted at the 2007 Venice Biennial, centered around a breakup email Calle received. The artist took the letter to over 100 women of various disciplines, backgrounds and ages and they systematically take it apart and respond to this Mr. X. The gallery is filled with typographically diverse responses from fiction writers, justices, schoolteachers, teenagers, philosophers, artists, mothers, scientists with (self?) portraits of the responders and video. It helps if you know French but the show is so visually intriguing as it is that you'll get the gist of most of it. And for additional help Calle enlisted a translator's response, so you can read the bastard's original email in translated English.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Calle's installation was, visually, incredibly appealing — and I think this goes for all sorts of backgrounds. Mine as a graphic designer, I was attracted to the typography and the way the texts reflected the hundred women subjects and their respective life paths. The proliferation of French did not dissuade from the clear, necessarily diverse message of tactile support to the jilted artist. You left Calle's show feeling some of what she felt, and what these women felt for her, Calle's asinine ex-beau, and the general situation.
5. Charles Ray "Early Sculptures" @ Matthew Marks Gallery
What I said then:
05162009: Lots going on in this nearly empty room, courtesy of three of the artist's vintage seldom-exhibited '80s sculpture. "Spinning Floor", a rotating floor tile, is the most apparently approachable, though I have to wonder what would happen if you stepped on it, I mean there was no like caution tape surrounding the spinning tile nor a gallery staffer stationed nearby. "Moving Wires" is a little freaky and a little funny, two long wires move in and out of the wall at like chest-height @ varying speeds. And though it's mechanized it doesn't FEEL mechanized, in person, due to the sort of chancey movement of each wire, like there's somebody stationed behind the wall actually pulling them manually. Now "Ink Line" is the coolest and harbors the most risk, and by risk I mean inevitability for a huge mess. This 'sculpture' appears, in photos and intriguingly in person, at first, as a long black string extending from ceiling to floor, but that's where the staticness ceases. Let your other senses go to work, as in smell: there's like a strong odor of ink when you first enter the gallery, even though this piece is like way off to one side, and hearing: you don't even need to be right up on this one to hear the trickling stream of ink from point A to point B. That's a live cascade of black fluid coming from a dime-sized hole in the ceiling, pouring into a similar-sized hole in the floor, and if you look close you'll detect fluctuations in the stream. This stuff is REAL, and no need to use your remaining two senses to test "Ink Line"s realism, like grab at it and the results will mimic the poor fools who slapped the 'top' of Ray's "Ink Box" and realized the piece was like brimming w/ ink. Oops.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Three delicious rare 'interactive' sculptures from the constantly status-quo-defying artist. You had to experience this w/ your five senses, take in the sharp odor from "Ink Line" (like a gas station) and the subtle sounds coming from the same and "Spinning Floor". In fact, an empty room w/ just "Ink Line" would have sufficed, as this piece, in its debut display, had so much going on, from the subsurface gurgling noises of the ink pooling somewhere before the floor to the whole mechanics of installing the thing, a shimmering black stream flowing from way up in point A to way down in point B. The freaky "Moving Wires", w/ its seemingly random timing and propensity to surprise, especially if you approach the thing dead on and don't catch the gleaming wires, was a playful third. No other sculpture this year, in my opinion, so elegantly stacked up to Ray's three oldies.
6. "Twee as Fuck" concert @ Cake Shop
What I said then:
06212009: Oh my, this is going to be singularly big like a solar eclipse. Brooklyn's indie heavyweights The Stilts and The Pains together at last, tucked away in a crowded basement on the LES beneath a vegan-friendly coffee shop. Let's do a role-by-role comparison w/ caUSE co-MOTION, just to psych ourselves up. Best vocalist? If i'm feeling seriously moody, Brad's (Stilts) tongue-in-cheek deadpan rules, but it's a win b/w the Kip/Peggy (Pains) earnest harmonizing over Arno's (caUSE) nasally delivery. Guitar? J.B. (Stilts) can shred and Kip (Pains) rocks out, but Alex's (caUSE) jangly surf riffs are pretty neat-o. Bass? Liam (caUSE) thrashes and Alex (Pains) pummels, yet Andy's (Stilts) melodic basslines remind me of Mickey Finn. Keys? This is b/w Kyle (Stilts) and Peggy (Pains) b/c caUSE co-MOTION don't have a keyboard player, so sorry Kyle, but Peggy wins this by a mile. Drummer? This is a tie: Kurt (Pains) adds a machinelike muscularity, Jock (caUSE) pounds quite elaborately on a stripped-down set, but Frankie Rose (Stilts) has speed and 4dexterity on her side, plus she usually drums standing up a la Maureen Tucker. Verdict: MAYJAH.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
Easily the best concert I attended in 2009. Everything worked out, from the stress of obtaining advance tix (Cake Shop notably only sells tix at the door except special events, like this one, where I trekked out to sister venue Bruar Falls in Wsburg to nab my seemingly hand-drawn Twee as Fuck ticket from the bartender's envelope; in retrospect I wish I could've kept it, totally scrapbook-worthy) to arriving at the show after my evening Japanese course w/ time to navigate the swelling crowd so I could locate the ideal vantage point for maximum satisfaction. English lads Hatcham Social led the evening, these four floppy-haired blokes w/ hangdogish grins and nonchalant demeanor, but they played the hell out of their instruments (incl the standup drummer), kicking through track after track of Pulp-era proper '90s pop. I slid up to the front-left of the stage to dance to caUSE co-MOTION!, who came close to inciting a twee moshpit. Liam was leaping all over the place, colliding w/ Cake Shop's low ceiling but never losing the groove on his basslines. Arno and Alex played like it wasn't no thang. When Crystal Stilts took the stage, and everyone was sweating by this point, all the lights went out and somebody stage-left used a handheld projector like a spotlight/disco ball, so the Stilts played their trundling, glammed-up Velvet Underground tunes in what turned into one of their older tracks, a "Prismatic Room". So absurdly cool. And everyone lost their minds when The Pains of Being Pure at Heart came on. Peggy reinstated the 'ooh - ooh - ooohhh's that added such exhilaration to "Come Saturday", amid the swirling guitar distortion, and her co-vocalization w/ Kip was on point. And Kip led the band w/ a casual mastery that belied their relative newness to the scene. They played "103" too, which was a teaser of the great tracks to come in the next few months ("Twins", "Higher Than the Stars"). Perfection.
7. New York Asian Film Festival 2009 @ IFC Center + Japan Society
What I said then:
06212009: I am fiend for film festivals, and NYAFF in particular. There's like 40 films this year, running the gamut from the ultra-violent and sexually explicit to the heart-warming and -rending, from serious dramatic/historic pieces to fractured romantic comedy. I mean, we have everything from "Ip Man", the sepia-tinted Hong Kong production based around Bruce Lee's wing chun grandmaster, to the centerpiece presentation, a violent li'l number by Yoshihiro Nishimura descriptively entitled "Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl". And there are special screenings of Korean Short Films, two nights of Japanese Pink Eiga (which translates sort of into 'softcore porn', but it's not quite that), and a special 3+ hr "Tokyo Gore Night" on June 27. Take a deep breath. You can bet this will be dope. If y'r on Facebook, you've probably received a special NYAFF 2009 invite from moi, listing the shows I'm attending (currently about 20) and other juicy info. If y'r not, check out the site for the full schedule and ticket info. And get on this, b/c Asian films are go!!!!!!!
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
So the NYAFF is practically a shoe-in for LIST BEST OF-inclusion. Why? B/c it epitomizes what my LIST is all about: the marriage of high art (serious drama/romance like Kim Ki-duk's "Dream" and Nick Chin's "Magazine Gap Road"), high action (Wilson Yip's "Ip Man" and Ryu Seung-wan's "Dachimawa Lee") and high violence/sex/nudity/etc (Yoshihiro Nishimura's "Vampire Girl v. Frankenstein Girl", whose original Japanese title "Kyuuketsu Shoujo tai Shoujo Furanken" is just as wicked, for one). B/c it included Sion Sono's mind-melting magnum opus "Love Exposure", a four-hour treatise on religion, family, cultism and pornography that married Ravel's "Bolero" so wonderfully. B/c it included multiple nights of hard-gore Japanese film, unlike anything you've ever seen (and even if you caught Nishimura's "Tokyo Gore Police" at last year's, trust me they go even further than that). B/c the quieter moments, like Eriko Kitagawa's "Halfway" and Lee Kyeong-mi's "Crush & Blush", really shined. And b/c I'm already beginning to meditate in preparation of next year's no-doubt beyond-awesome festival.
8. Underwater Peoples Records Showcase @ Market Hotel
What I said then:
08252009: Can we say MAYJAH? I am really really into the DC-based Underwater Peoples label, which bears that fuzzy lo-fi brilliance of Brooklyn's Woodsist and Captured Tracks labels but maintains this almost (dare I write it?) 'West Coast' sunniness in their artist roster. Like you can listen to all these bands and you're instantly transported to the beach (Long Beach, in this case, or at least the Rockaways). Their summer showcase is a big HELLO to this late-emerging seasonal weather and comes w/ my strongest recommendation. Come early for guitar-loopy Ducktails (aka Matt from Real Estate) and the singularly fantastic Beach Fossils (and rock the beach!), stay for Alex Beeker & The Freaks (aka Alex from Real Estate), Air Waves and headlined by Jersey's finest indie-rockers Real Estate — heard of them?
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
What a brilliant way to end a humid summer of dope live music! Braving the muggy temps and high percentage of rain and hauling out on the J to Bushwick, to the AC-less Market Hotel above the Mr. Kiwi grocery store next to the elevated line! That was like 10% of the fun, the remainder when to the cheap ticket price and the enormous roster of summer-friendly woozy, surf-rock bands from DC's Underwater Peoples label. I arrived during Big Troubles' set and it was hella loud, garage-rock style, raw but catchy. Ducktails' Matt mesmerized the audience w/ his deceptively simple setup of FX pedals and guitar, like he always does, and we were lulled to like a soporific translucence (perhaps also courtesy of the contact high in the air) before he ended his way too brief set. Liam the Younger surprised w/ a pretty spot-on, dirty cover of Nirvana's "Territorial Pissing". Beach Fossils had everybody dancing; you can't listen to 'em and NOT dance. My first brush w/ Fluffy Lumbers (which got me absolutely hooked on his hook-driven "Cruisers") and Family Portrait (ditto to "Mega Secrets") and Real Estate brought the whole sultry late-summer night to a lovely conclusion.
9. Anselm Reyle "Monochrome Age" @ Gagosian + Takashi Murakami
What I said then:
09292009: Much as I lauded the subtler shows in last week's LIST (Anthony Pearson, Chris Ofili and James Turrell for three), I do love a spectacle. And Reyle, the youngish German neo-Abstract Expressionist, is by definition a spectacle: his oeuvre consists of high-gloss sheen, new-car colors, techno patina and lots of chrome and sharp stuff. This exhibition, a mix of his works throughout the years, is a head-scratcher b/c really I don't know how he pulls off some of this stuff. The monochromes, oil-slick canvases abraded w/ various detritus, are like Max Ernst-style frottage/grattage works on Creatine. The silver metallic bales of 'hay' are fibre-optic styled. That much I get. But the mirrored tower of doom, this multitiered crystal piece that emanates some vague spicy scent through its glowing orifices, that I don't get. Nor the massive crinkly jewel-box, like a large crumpled bit of wrapping paper, that phases through an iridescent spectrum as you pass by it and observe it from different angles — I don't know how the hell he made this one, but it's absolutely gorgeous.
+ Takashi Murakami "Picture of Fate: I am but a Fisherman Who Angles in the Darkness of His MInd". The preceding is just the name of Murakami's one-piece show, viewable in the side room to Reyle's delirious gallery-filling affair. The title of the four-panel Murakami contribution, however, is "A Picture of the Blessed Lion Who Stares at Death", and it's a beauty. Murakami mostly eschews the pop-flowers and cartoony-ness you might best know him by, focusing instead on the mythology of the Karajishi ("China-lion") and its ritual and survival. The sheer detailing of this gigantic piece, the Karajishi and its cubs moving about a human-skull bridge against a patina-rich background (I immediately thought 'blotter paper') is breathtaking.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I'd already fallen in love w/ Reyle's spectrum-conquering eye candy before this sort-of retrospective, but the show cemented by appreciation for the German artist and his kind of neo-Abstract Expressionism. I run short on adjectives for his art: ecstatically colorful, future-perfect shiny, enraptured junk-sculpture, yummy shock-bright bijoux. He's comfortable w/ both multitoned Mylar and paint-coated found objet, w/ neon, mirrors and like sharp adaptations of Piero Manzoni's "Achromes". His art can run as glossily manufactured as Jeff Koons', but it retains a twisted quality signature to Reyle. And Murakami's tasty, patina-drenched "A Picture of the Blessed Lion Who Stares at Death" acted as sort of old-reliable psychedelics to Reyle's designer drugs.
10. Urs Fischer "Marguerite de Ponty" @ New Museum
What I said then:
11242009: It's a safe bet many of us art-lovers (and sometimes-enthusiasts) have been anticipating Fischer's gallery-filling solo show. Maybe for his gleeful irreverence to standing architecture (aka 'investigation of space', as in the floor-razing "You" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise a few years back), maybe for his multitalented mixed medium works (melting candle figures, cast-aluminum 'soft' sculpture, anti-Dada 'readymades'). Lots of scare-quotes here, sorry, but it's necessary. And Fischer's exhibition, of works from the past few years, exceeds in expectation whilst simultaneously lifting his cred as a serious artist. The sole hole here, the advert-spoiler "Noisette", is a motion-sensitive tongue that thrusts itself out a tennis ball-sized wall gash: it's a bit of a raspberry to his naysayers, maybe, but it's playful, innocent, innocuous, and by far the best thing. Start from the 4th fl, amid the towering cast-aluminum abstract forms, and decide for yourself what they mean. Maybe "Ix" is a horse-head (the missing head from Mauricio Cattelan's famous "Untitled"? Or Berlinde de Bruyckere's unsettling taxidermy?), or the stunning "David, the Proprietor" a primeval sea beast lashing up from the ocean's depths, or the eponymous "Marguerite de Ponty" a stately, voluptuous lifeform? The other bits in this room, the Robert Gober-esque (in a terribly surreal way) "The Lock", w/ its truncated subway bench and hovering cake, and the bizarrely-titled "Violent Cappuccino" (more aluminum and paint, in the guise of a skeleton fighting off 'cardboard boxes'), are cool to look at but are recurring characters in Fischer's past works. The 3rd fl is trippy, nearly empty save for the aforementioned "Noisette" and a melting (cast-aluminum again) piano. But the great surprise here is the site-specific environment, the collaborative effort w/ graphic designer Scipio Schneider, an installation where the empty gallery was exhaustively photographed and then reprinted as wall- and ceiling-paper. The result: soft pinks, purples and greens w/ trompe l'oeil shadows, sky-light, and public-safety signs. You need several minutes to really take in the unsettling effect — leave the floor if necessary but come back to see it again. He's done this before (the doubled "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns" environment in Tony Shafrazi Gallery last year, replete w/ Shafrazi 'guards', was a trip), but the sneak-up quality here exceeds the earlier works. The 2nd fl, beginning or preferably the end, is Fischer's new multipart work "Service à la Française", but what this means is dozens of mirrored chrome boxes, silkscreened on all surfaces w/ a single object each: a sofa-sized tennis shoe, a milk-crate-sized Balenciaga strappy heel, a canoe-sized sausage. This piece works so well: it's Fischer having fun again but it's a joy to explore. Check the repetitions: halved red Bartlett pear here, rotting red Bartlett pear there; wax-candle cupcake here, deliciously-rendered chocolate-frosted cupcake (replete w/ sprinkles, naturally) there. The effect of it all, and seeing glimpses of yourself in the mirrors as you dash from one objet d'art to the next, is stimulus-overload, exhilarating, thoroughly recommended.
Why it is LIST TOP TEN-worthy:
I summed up Fischer's worthiness above, but then I began noticing the NEW ads for the exhibit. They still include that raspberrying "Noisette" only now the tongue (and surrounding hole-in-wall) are superimposed on a blanked out version of the museum's exterior, shot elevated and from across the street as if a 20' version of the rascally installation was protruding from the wedding cake-tiered white box. Of course this is not the case. The casual viewer will see this ad and laugh, perhaps nervously, and then, interest appropriately piqued, will see the show. The informed viewer, knowledgeable of Fischer's craft and past tomfooleries, will smirk "oh that Urs, up to it again, eh?" all bemused-like, and then they'll see the show. That's all well. But "Noisette" and what it implies (holes in walls, childlike destruction, wagging tongues) is but a mere blip in this fascinating, mature suite of newish works. The space-defying wallpaper on the 3rd floor is evidence alone of this young artist's continued sophistication. The labor-intensive chrome-box installation on the 2nd floor is further proof. Hot stuff.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
fee's LIST (through 12/15)
WEDNESDAY
* Frat Dad + Beach Fossils @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Bushwick (L to Grand), 8p. A night of sunny lo-fi, punk-tinged indie rock. If that's what y'r craving, go to Shea Stadium.
* Darlings + The Naked Hearts @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$6. A night of good-vibes indie rock. If that's what y'r craving, go to Cake Shop.
* Spencer Sweeney @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Sweeney's typical acrylic and mixed media paintings and drawings (ranging from effectively crude to astoundingly complex, a la Josh Smith) play off what he calls a 'rock opera' that will progress throughout the exhibition's duration.
* Paolo Ventura "Winter Stories" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. I caught a like two-spread feature on Ventura's C-prints of snowy street-scenes and just-abandoned rooms in the Nov issue of "Harpers" and I'm convinced. This exhibition also includes his watercolors and ink drawings: works in progress or standalone projects?
THURSDAY
* Zhang Huan "Neither Coming Nor Going" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. You know..I've been diligently finalizing my LIST TOP TEN end-of-year thing, and then Zhang's exhibition comes 'round. And it could be a game-changer. As in: the monumental ash Buddha "Rulai" (which may well rival last year's cowhide mother-and-child sculpture), imbued w/ various traditional offerings, plus a series of ink-on-paper works from traditional materials. Tasty stuff!
* Anthony McCall "Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence") @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. McCall augments his already stunning 'solid light' works w/ sound, for the 1st time in three decades, w/ the titular installation (a collaboration w/ composer David Grubbs), plus works on paper and another light-projection piece in the smaller gallery.
* "In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists since 1955 @ X / 548 W 22nd St. The coup de grace, ground floor exhibition in X's third (and final) wave of shows. A survey of classic and contemporary — and typically extremely avant-garde — serial works, from Robert Heinecken's modified Periodicals to Maurizio Cattelan's Permanent Food, w/ recent contributions from Tom Sachs, Roni Horn, Terence Koh and many others.
* "Il sorpasso/The Easy Life" (dir. Dino Risi, 1962) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 8p. Risi's sun-in-your-face ode to Commedia all'italiana, a wild ride through the Riviera w/ one bawdy middle-aged bloke (indefatigable Vittorio Gassman) and his younger straight-laced traveler (Jean-Louis Trintignant, like two decades before his chilling lead role in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist"), and of course lots of gorgeous girls.
* Matt Connors, Arturo Herrera, Merlin James "Building on a Cliff" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Three painting-based artists w/ a penchant for exploring further means of expression. I'm most familiar w/ Connors' frame-like paintings and Herrera's terribly experimental works (everything from latex on the wall to hanging cutouts a la Kara Walker crossed w/ Robert Morris) so I wonder what they come up w/ in this show.
* Brian Calvin @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Acrylic paintings and ink-on-paper works of long-haired girls, interspersed here and there w/ the odd beachscape. Sounds perfect to me.
* Martin Wong "Everything Must Go" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St 3rd Fl. A career-spanning glimpse into Wong's estate, feat. his '80s-NYC paintings of his urban environment plus rare photo collages and drawings.
* Bernardi Roig "Pierror le fou is (not) Dead" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Roig's creepy George Segal-ian sculptures are encumbered or obliterated by glowing fluorescent tubes and fixtures. I don't know what that has to do w/ the JLG-echoed title but it's got my interest.
* Ducktails + Gary War @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. NICE. Gary War's underwater Joy Division-ish songs v. the ear-tantalizingly gorgeous guitar-loops of Mr. Mondanile (Ducktails).
* Jon Pylypchuk "The War" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. An installation of large-scale illuminated sculpture that echoes the Oceania Wing of the Met only made of household objects, or in the words of the gallery 'emo-pop'.
FRIDAY
* "Hedy" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1966) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. Mario Montez portrays Hollywood siren Hedy Lamarr in a typically surreally Warholian affair, replete w/ Superstars (Mary Wonorov, Ingrid Superstar) and live music from the Velvet Underground. (ALSO SUN 4p)
+ "Vinyl" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1965) screening @ 9p. Warhol's take on "A Clockwork Orange" (Burgess version, not Kubrick's, obvs), w/ babyfaced Gerald Malanga in the hoodlum's role and Edie Sedgwick in a captivating (though totally silent!) cameo. (ALSO MON 7p)
* Tyvek + Air Waves + Noveller @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$8. Ahh I really want to make this show, but the acts I'm keenest about (Sarah Lipstate's drone-guitar show as Noveller, bliss-indies Air Waves) play first! Show up early for 'em, then show your love for Tyvek.
* Sharon Lockhart "Lunch Break" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. The artist creates a portrait of an ironworkers' labor force via indirect means, a long tracking shot of the environs plus related C-prints of the workers and their telltale lunchboxes — all done in her signature vividness.
* "Duburys (Vortex)" (dir. Gytis Luksas, 2009) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 7p. This sumptuous b&w film, depicting a young man's movement through a Soviet-era world (replete w/ the military, corrupt jobs, and balanced romances), is in its stateside debut. (ALSO SAT 3:15p)
* The Beets w/ Great Lakes @ Brooklyn Tea Party / 175 Stockholm St #303, Bushwick (L to DeKalb, M to Central), 8p. I think I am most comfortable seeing Jackson Heights' ultra-catchy Beets at house parties.
* "Bicycle Thieves/Ladri di biciclette" (dir. Vittorio de Sica, 1948) screenings @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (456/NRW/L to Union Square). Look how good you've got it, NY: De Sica's pinnacle to Italian Neorealism cinema playing multiple times on the big-screen, and out of festival too. Hard-working dad just wants to do good for his son, becomes a mobile sign-painter and gets his bike stolen straight out. Depressing in the classic Neorealist sense, but absolutely essential classic cinema.
SATURDAY
* "Horse" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1965) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. If you haven't had enough Warhol already, this homoerotic take on the Western should do just nicely. Esp. due to the highly experimental, multiple-reel quality of the shoot itself. (ALSO TUES 8:45p)
* Vivian Girls + Yellow Fever @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. I was afraid local girls Cassie Ramone + crew had outgrown the tiny dive-y DbA, now that their 2nd wicked album "Everything Goes Wrong" is out. But I'm so glad they're playing here again, as I dig their fresh punk energy in close settings. And Austin TX's stripped-down punk, courtesy of Yellow Fever, should do nicely.
* Tim Gardner @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Gardner's new show in years at the gallery, comprised of large watercolors of singular figures in the environment, whether that's a forest or an urban concrete-scape. The compositions are quiet, but they have this underlying intensity that holds your gaze.
* Small Black @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. I 1st caught Small Black in July, same venue, when they opened for Beach Fossils, and now look at 'em, headlining less than six months later. Which doesn't surprise me, as their gritty brand of 'glo-fi' pop is as danceable as it is punkish.
* Audrey Kawasaki "Hajimari – a prelude" + James Marshall "And There Was War in Heaven" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. YUM. Kawasaki's lovely nymph-like characters (oils on wood panels) v. Marshall's (aka Dalek) neon-drenched cartoonish 'scapes.
* Tyvek + The Beets @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey), 8p/$6. Second best thing to seeing The Beets perform a house party is when they perform in the kitchen of Silent Barn. And if you missed Tyvek last night, here's another opportunity to lose your mind.
SUNDAY
* Gabriel Orozco @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). One of the many benefits of being a MoMA member (besides the free admission and line-skipping) is previewing special exhibits. And I HAD to preview Orozco's retrospective before its proper Sunday public debut b/c I've got a year-end BEST OF LIST coming up on the blog and my reaction to this show would finalize my top ten picks for 2009. This hot exhibition is one of three of its kind this season (incl. Urs Fischer @ the New Museum and Roni Horn @ Whitney) and it is precisely unlike the biggies from spring/summer (think Jenny Holzer and Dan Graham @ Whitney, Yinka Shonibare MBE @ Brooklyn Museum, and if you will Francis Bacon @ Met, though that's a bit different). What I mean by this is the spring/summer retrospectives/solo exhibitions were, ostensibly one medium. Sure Graham's a conceptualist and Shonibare's stretched from his signature diorama installations to video, but a common thread was obvious (no pun, for Shonibare). The autumn/winter shows, however, are truly diverse: Horn's purely stoic, minimalist sculpture and landscape/portraiture C-prints; Fischer's trompe l'oeil mixed media sculpture and vivid depth-perception installations; and now Orozco. And you could call Orozco a conceptualist too, in his careful and subtle manipulation of reality and our known environment.
In one sentence: I dug the retrospective. Here's why: go straight upstairs and AVERT YOUR EYES on the way up (there's something hanging in the atrium, perhaps the 2nd best use of that space since Pipilotti Rist's inclusive video installation), and on the top floor you are confronted by two conflicting objects. A smoke-and-forest-filled wallpaper, punctuated in one spot by a bemused girl's head as she blows a bubblegum bubble (it's a very "Lifeforms"-era Future Sound of London, experience. Ten cool points if you get that reference), called "Notebook 6", fills nearly your entire frame of vision, but it's interrupted by "Elevator", a lifesize frighteningly machine-heavy lift, illuminated from w/in but removed from its traditional elevator shaft. Lying in its resplendent tonnage on the 6th fl of the MoMA, in wide-open view, it takes on a multitude of guises, prison chamber not the least obscure. And that's Orozco: plucking a seemingly familiar object and then suddenly it becomes something else. There are many cool things to see, though the empty shoe box at the beginning is just banal enough to throw you off-step — maybe that's the point? Orozco's 'circle' works come in a few flavors: the older gouache-and-ink "Atomist"s on either 'electrostatic' newsprint or common stuff like $ and Korean notebook pages, where the green circles morph virally out of seemingly nowhere to consume either the polo match or the lined paper; or the glisteningly bright "Samurai Tree"s from a few years ago, their gold-leaf finishes flashing under the gallery lights. The positions of the circles on this particular series follow the L-patterns of the knight in chess, at least that's what the museum explanation imparts, which makes sense b/c knights (and chess) figure into more of Orozco's art. Like the gorgeous "Horses Running Endlessly", a huge carved-wood chessboard from '95 outfitted entirely w/ knights. His knack for turning one thing into another figure strongly in the next room, like the haunting "Black Kites" (1997, a graphite chessboard on a real human skull), the textural "Eyes Under Elephant Foot" (2009, a flared, massive beaucarnea stump outfitted w/ glass eyes, a cross b/w Christopher Walken's iconic "Googly Eyes" skit on SNL w/ Jim Henson's "Labyrinth"), and of course "La DS", the skinny-fied Citroen that cuts knifelike across the gallery-space like some shiny, deep-sea, primeval fish. I don't believe I have so lovingly contemplated an automobile IN MY LIFE. C-prints (pay attention to personal fave "Cats and Watermelons", from 1992) and paintings (the large "Tuttifrutti", 2008, all slashed gold, orange and apple-green circles, is a winner) ground this truly mixed discipline show, permitting wilder, intense works — "Dial Tone", from '92, a Japanese scroll-like offering composed of painstakingly cut and assembled phone-book page slivers, leaving just the numbers — to roam unfettered. OK, now go downstairs and stand under "Mobile Matrix" (2006), the gridded whale skeleton suspended above and swimming in the atrium's air. And since I learned from Rist's super-descriptive title that the atrium holds about 7354 cubic meters, you'll have to trust me until you see it for yourself, but this Orozco giant needs every bit of that space.
* Blank Dogs + Led Er Est @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. CanNOT wait to experience the hot, gloomy grit of Blank Dogs, but just remember: beneath all the distortion and electronics, those are some really dope pop songs. Led Er Est's darkwave + Gameboy antics should be a good foil.
* "Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR" (dir. Jonas Mekas, 2008) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 12:30p. The festival heavyweight (literally in its five-hour screentime and abstractly in the subject matter), Mekas' recounting of Lithuania's independence and inception into the United Nations from March '90 through Sept '91, told via his home video camera and daily news broadcasts. I've seen clips of this, in an installation of Mekas' at Stendhal Gallery, and it's riveting, given his particular POV and his means of documentation: you feel as though you are living it, the liberation of Mekas' homeland, through his eyes.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Olivier Zahm @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. Yum, typically sexy b&w (and a few color) prints from Zahm's close lens, of the requisite sudsy girls, cigarette haze, and twilit scenes. Several of the shots are accompanied by blown-up screenprints a la really wicked wallpaper, so the entire range functions sort of like an installation.
* Kazuo Shiraga "Six Decades" @ McCaffrey Fine Arts / 23 E 67th St. Lots of 1sts in this brief but intensely compelling show: 1st US solo show for the Zero-kai founder and Gutai member (think sort of like Japanese Fluxus, for absolute shorthand purposes); 1st in-depth catalogue in English; and I'll go ahead + posit that much of the works here (besides Shiraga's singular "Challenging Mud" from the mid-50s) have NEVER shown in the US. Much as contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein approached the canvas w/ wildly new forms of abstraction, so did Shiraga, substituting his feet for brushes, to confidently energetic results. In fact, the range here is incredible, from the explosive reddish energy of "Chizensei Kirenji (Demon Face incarnated from Earthly Whole Star)" (Shiraga's titles are amazing, and remind me of Keiji Haino's lengthy, descriptive song titles) from '61 to the heavily impasto'd "Kanyou" from '80 and "Souryuu no Mai (Dance of the Two-Headed Dragon)" from '94 — both of whose densely textured surfaces are lightened by diaphanous strains of green and white, respectively —, to the fluid "Funryuu (Jetstream)" from '73, a dance of b&w alkyd paint that half resembles the melted deliciousness remaining at the end of a chocolate-syrup-inundated sundae.
* Tracey Emin "Only God Knows I'm Good" @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. An extensive show of Emin's scratchy linoprint drawings and 'sewn' works on paper — which are really cool b/c they reference one another, and I have to wonder how hard it was to get the embroidery to so closely resemble her particular handwriting and line style. The art? Sexual, debasing, tongue-in-cheek. And don't miss upstairs, the only way to see the show title, rendered in Emin's handwriting in white-hot neon, like a beacon way up there.
* Andrzej Zielinski "Shredders" @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. Zielinski's history of rendering common, dated machines (faxes, cordless phones, shredders) in odd-color, banal fashion, just got a whole lot cooler. His latest exhibition, of the lowly paper shredder, contains like a dozen complex mixed media works (involving what looks to be either wood or foam) on panels, creating texture-rich reliefs of the classic office objet.
* Hiroyuki Nakamura "The Sky Above" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Think of the bad guys from "The Hills Have Eyes", done up in Western duds. Or, if you will, a cross between Kabuki makeup and John Wayne.
* Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St #3. A deceptively simple show, ostensibly three artists comfortable w/ wall art. But that's such a cop-out! Weiner's hot-pink "LAID OUT FLAT BENT [NOW] THIS WAY TURNED [NOW] THAT WAY (i.e. LOOPED OVER)" grounds the other two, the sunny yellow ruled and wobbly lines from LeWitt's circa-1971 wall piece (in contemporary terms, it looks a bit like Wolfgang Laib's hand-sifted pollen installations) and two very intriguing takes from Sonnier. The noisy one, feat. flickering lights, latex and a motor, feels more typical but the other, a wall-mounted trapezoid of flock w/ string, intrigues in its rawness.
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
* Paul McCarthy "White Snow" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A deliciously dirty show of new works from the relentlessly deviant (yet always grandfatherly) artist — at massive 7x10' McCarthy-scale paper collages. Beyond his usual charcoal drawings and scribbly oil-stick, these works incl. tears from exhibition catalogues (Christie's bears sharp notice, esp. extended views of Jeff Koons' shows) and porn mags. Good old Paul! The bizarre titles ("GAP", "Michael Jackson", "100") generally come from some magazine element on the massive works and obscurely reference the on-page action. Though by the time we get to "Inside Her Ordeal", a personal fave, the aforementioned dense maelstroms wash away into a rather spare piece, w/ a glassy eyed Snow grinning out into oblivion.
* David Hockney "Paintings 2006-2009" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St + 32 E 57th St. I never thought I'd enjoy a straightforward landscape painting show as much as I enjoyed Hockney's. His renderings of Yorkshire, which mostly involves glades, felled trees and bunches of hawthorne, through various seasons, are magnetizing. The colors are fanciful (purplish roads, orange grass) yet visceral in his capture of the specific lighting. And the depth of these, esp. the woods, stretch for miles away. You know those scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up", when David Hemmings is in the park and all you hear is the sound of the wind through the trees? That's what this exhibition feels like.
* Mike Kelley "Horizontal Tracking Lines" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Goodness, Kelley is a weirdo. His latest show is one heady trip, but it builds on his earlier accomplishments (coital rag-dolls, modified Abstract Expressionism, quirky video) so if you're familiar w/ his trickery, use his reputation to your advantage here. Expect: misshapen canvases bearing crudely rendered cartoonish or pornish figures amid smeared paint — and each of these is mounted on flat-color polychrome panels like massive pixels. Even better: the eponymous installation "Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms", which feat. more polychrome bars and three test-patterened video screens that project, once the click-track ends, random, split-second (and generally hilarious) Youtube clips. Think less his narrative-driven "Day is Done" and more like Luis Gispert's "Pony Show".
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* "Figment" Group Show @ Kumukumu Gallery / 42 Rivington St. Guest curator Florence Uchida culls Rob Wynne and Gina Ruggeri for this complementarily trippy show. Ruggeri's Mylar cutouts (caves, tree roots) break up the otherwise bare walls, though Wynne's contribution really shines. His accouterments, glass mushrooms and bronze eggs, recall Roxy Paine's attention to hallucinogenic detail, but retain a whimsical influence — pun intended.
* Sean Scully @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. The neatest part of Scully's show is sorting out which canvases are linen and which are aluminum, as the fuzzy-edged blocks of paint take rather well to each. Though, like the press release, I dig "LANDBAR" quite a bit, as he exposes one panel of aluminum amid the painted surfaces.
* Aya Takano "Reintegrating Worlds" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. The 1st solo show from the young Kaikai Kiki artist is a beaut, all pastel-toned acrylics of girls and animals interacting in a sort of stoned contemporary take on Amami Oshima Islands culture. Beyond what appears to be a flooded subway, most of the action occurs outdoors, in a landscape occupied by deer and cats.
* Frat Dad + Beach Fossils @ Shea Stadium / 20 Meadow St, Bushwick (L to Grand), 8p. A night of sunny lo-fi, punk-tinged indie rock. If that's what y'r craving, go to Shea Stadium.
* Darlings + The Naked Hearts @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$6. A night of good-vibes indie rock. If that's what y'r craving, go to Cake Shop.
* Spencer Sweeney @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise / 620 Greenwich St. Sweeney's typical acrylic and mixed media paintings and drawings (ranging from effectively crude to astoundingly complex, a la Josh Smith) play off what he calls a 'rock opera' that will progress throughout the exhibition's duration.
* Paolo Ventura "Winter Stories" @ Hasted Hunt Kraeutler / 537 W 24th St. I caught a like two-spread feature on Ventura's C-prints of snowy street-scenes and just-abandoned rooms in the Nov issue of "Harpers" and I'm convinced. This exhibition also includes his watercolors and ink drawings: works in progress or standalone projects?
THURSDAY
* Zhang Huan "Neither Coming Nor Going" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. You know..I've been diligently finalizing my LIST TOP TEN end-of-year thing, and then Zhang's exhibition comes 'round. And it could be a game-changer. As in: the monumental ash Buddha "Rulai" (which may well rival last year's cowhide mother-and-child sculpture), imbued w/ various traditional offerings, plus a series of ink-on-paper works from traditional materials. Tasty stuff!
* Anthony McCall "Leaving (with Two-Minute Silence") @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. McCall augments his already stunning 'solid light' works w/ sound, for the 1st time in three decades, w/ the titular installation (a collaboration w/ composer David Grubbs), plus works on paper and another light-projection piece in the smaller gallery.
* "In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists since 1955 @ X / 548 W 22nd St. The coup de grace, ground floor exhibition in X's third (and final) wave of shows. A survey of classic and contemporary — and typically extremely avant-garde — serial works, from Robert Heinecken's modified Periodicals to Maurizio Cattelan's Permanent Food, w/ recent contributions from Tom Sachs, Roni Horn, Terence Koh and many others.
* "Il sorpasso/The Easy Life" (dir. Dino Risi, 1962) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St), 8p. Risi's sun-in-your-face ode to Commedia all'italiana, a wild ride through the Riviera w/ one bawdy middle-aged bloke (indefatigable Vittorio Gassman) and his younger straight-laced traveler (Jean-Louis Trintignant, like two decades before his chilling lead role in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist"), and of course lots of gorgeous girls.
* Matt Connors, Arturo Herrera, Merlin James "Building on a Cliff" @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co / 530 W 22nd St. Three painting-based artists w/ a penchant for exploring further means of expression. I'm most familiar w/ Connors' frame-like paintings and Herrera's terribly experimental works (everything from latex on the wall to hanging cutouts a la Kara Walker crossed w/ Robert Morris) so I wonder what they come up w/ in this show.
* Brian Calvin @ Anton Kern Gallery / 532 W 20th St. Acrylic paintings and ink-on-paper works of long-haired girls, interspersed here and there w/ the odd beachscape. Sounds perfect to me.
* Martin Wong "Everything Must Go" @ PPOW / 511 W 25th St 3rd Fl. A career-spanning glimpse into Wong's estate, feat. his '80s-NYC paintings of his urban environment plus rare photo collages and drawings.
* Bernardi Roig "Pierror le fou is (not) Dead" @ Claire Oliver / 513 W 26th St. Roig's creepy George Segal-ian sculptures are encumbered or obliterated by glowing fluorescent tubes and fixtures. I don't know what that has to do w/ the JLG-echoed title but it's got my interest.
* Ducktails + Gary War @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. NICE. Gary War's underwater Joy Division-ish songs v. the ear-tantalizingly gorgeous guitar-loops of Mr. Mondanile (Ducktails).
* Jon Pylypchuk "The War" @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery / 537 W 22nd St. An installation of large-scale illuminated sculpture that echoes the Oceania Wing of the Met only made of household objects, or in the words of the gallery 'emo-pop'.
FRIDAY
* "Hedy" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1966) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. Mario Montez portrays Hollywood siren Hedy Lamarr in a typically surreally Warholian affair, replete w/ Superstars (Mary Wonorov, Ingrid Superstar) and live music from the Velvet Underground. (ALSO SUN 4p)
+ "Vinyl" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1965) screening @ 9p. Warhol's take on "A Clockwork Orange" (Burgess version, not Kubrick's, obvs), w/ babyfaced Gerald Malanga in the hoodlum's role and Edie Sedgwick in a captivating (though totally silent!) cameo. (ALSO MON 7p)
* Tyvek + Air Waves + Noveller @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$8. Ahh I really want to make this show, but the acts I'm keenest about (Sarah Lipstate's drone-guitar show as Noveller, bliss-indies Air Waves) play first! Show up early for 'em, then show your love for Tyvek.
* Sharon Lockhart "Lunch Break" @ Gladstone Gallery / 515 W 24th St. The artist creates a portrait of an ironworkers' labor force via indirect means, a long tracking shot of the environs plus related C-prints of the workers and their telltale lunchboxes — all done in her signature vividness.
* "Duburys (Vortex)" (dir. Gytis Luksas, 2009) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 7p. This sumptuous b&w film, depicting a young man's movement through a Soviet-era world (replete w/ the military, corrupt jobs, and balanced romances), is in its stateside debut. (ALSO SAT 3:15p)
* The Beets w/ Great Lakes @ Brooklyn Tea Party / 175 Stockholm St #303, Bushwick (L to DeKalb, M to Central), 8p. I think I am most comfortable seeing Jackson Heights' ultra-catchy Beets at house parties.
* "Bicycle Thieves/Ladri di biciclette" (dir. Vittorio de Sica, 1948) screenings @ Cinema Village / 22 E 12th St (456/NRW/L to Union Square). Look how good you've got it, NY: De Sica's pinnacle to Italian Neorealism cinema playing multiple times on the big-screen, and out of festival too. Hard-working dad just wants to do good for his son, becomes a mobile sign-painter and gets his bike stolen straight out. Depressing in the classic Neorealist sense, but absolutely essential classic cinema.
SATURDAY
* "Horse" (dir. Andy Warhol, 1965) screening @ Anthology Film Archives / 32 2nd Ave (FV to 2nd Ave), 7p. If you haven't had enough Warhol already, this homoerotic take on the Western should do just nicely. Esp. due to the highly experimental, multiple-reel quality of the shoot itself. (ALSO TUES 8:45p)
* Vivian Girls + Yellow Fever @ Death by Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$7. I was afraid local girls Cassie Ramone + crew had outgrown the tiny dive-y DbA, now that their 2nd wicked album "Everything Goes Wrong" is out. But I'm so glad they're playing here again, as I dig their fresh punk energy in close settings. And Austin TX's stripped-down punk, courtesy of Yellow Fever, should do nicely.
* Tim Gardner @ 303 Gallery / 547 W 21st St. Gardner's new show in years at the gallery, comprised of large watercolors of singular figures in the environment, whether that's a forest or an urban concrete-scape. The compositions are quiet, but they have this underlying intensity that holds your gaze.
* Small Black @ Cake Shop / 152 Ludlow St (FV to 2nd Ave), 8p/$8. I 1st caught Small Black in July, same venue, when they opened for Beach Fossils, and now look at 'em, headlining less than six months later. Which doesn't surprise me, as their gritty brand of 'glo-fi' pop is as danceable as it is punkish.
* Audrey Kawasaki "Hajimari – a prelude" + James Marshall "And There Was War in Heaven" @ Jonathan LeVine Gallery / 529 W 20th St. YUM. Kawasaki's lovely nymph-like characters (oils on wood panels) v. Marshall's (aka Dalek) neon-drenched cartoonish 'scapes.
* Tyvek + The Beets @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey), 8p/$6. Second best thing to seeing The Beets perform a house party is when they perform in the kitchen of Silent Barn. And if you missed Tyvek last night, here's another opportunity to lose your mind.
SUNDAY
* Gabriel Orozco @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave/53rd St, 6 to 51st St). One of the many benefits of being a MoMA member (besides the free admission and line-skipping) is previewing special exhibits. And I HAD to preview Orozco's retrospective before its proper Sunday public debut b/c I've got a year-end BEST OF LIST coming up on the blog and my reaction to this show would finalize my top ten picks for 2009. This hot exhibition is one of three of its kind this season (incl. Urs Fischer @ the New Museum and Roni Horn @ Whitney) and it is precisely unlike the biggies from spring/summer (think Jenny Holzer and Dan Graham @ Whitney, Yinka Shonibare MBE @ Brooklyn Museum, and if you will Francis Bacon @ Met, though that's a bit different). What I mean by this is the spring/summer retrospectives/solo exhibitions were, ostensibly one medium. Sure Graham's a conceptualist and Shonibare's stretched from his signature diorama installations to video, but a common thread was obvious (no pun, for Shonibare). The autumn/winter shows, however, are truly diverse: Horn's purely stoic, minimalist sculpture and landscape/portraiture C-prints; Fischer's trompe l'oeil mixed media sculpture and vivid depth-perception installations; and now Orozco. And you could call Orozco a conceptualist too, in his careful and subtle manipulation of reality and our known environment.
In one sentence: I dug the retrospective. Here's why: go straight upstairs and AVERT YOUR EYES on the way up (there's something hanging in the atrium, perhaps the 2nd best use of that space since Pipilotti Rist's inclusive video installation), and on the top floor you are confronted by two conflicting objects. A smoke-and-forest-filled wallpaper, punctuated in one spot by a bemused girl's head as she blows a bubblegum bubble (it's a very "Lifeforms"-era Future Sound of London, experience. Ten cool points if you get that reference), called "Notebook 6", fills nearly your entire frame of vision, but it's interrupted by "Elevator", a lifesize frighteningly machine-heavy lift, illuminated from w/in but removed from its traditional elevator shaft. Lying in its resplendent tonnage on the 6th fl of the MoMA, in wide-open view, it takes on a multitude of guises, prison chamber not the least obscure. And that's Orozco: plucking a seemingly familiar object and then suddenly it becomes something else. There are many cool things to see, though the empty shoe box at the beginning is just banal enough to throw you off-step — maybe that's the point? Orozco's 'circle' works come in a few flavors: the older gouache-and-ink "Atomist"s on either 'electrostatic' newsprint or common stuff like $ and Korean notebook pages, where the green circles morph virally out of seemingly nowhere to consume either the polo match or the lined paper; or the glisteningly bright "Samurai Tree"s from a few years ago, their gold-leaf finishes flashing under the gallery lights. The positions of the circles on this particular series follow the L-patterns of the knight in chess, at least that's what the museum explanation imparts, which makes sense b/c knights (and chess) figure into more of Orozco's art. Like the gorgeous "Horses Running Endlessly", a huge carved-wood chessboard from '95 outfitted entirely w/ knights. His knack for turning one thing into another figure strongly in the next room, like the haunting "Black Kites" (1997, a graphite chessboard on a real human skull), the textural "Eyes Under Elephant Foot" (2009, a flared, massive beaucarnea stump outfitted w/ glass eyes, a cross b/w Christopher Walken's iconic "Googly Eyes" skit on SNL w/ Jim Henson's "Labyrinth"), and of course "La DS", the skinny-fied Citroen that cuts knifelike across the gallery-space like some shiny, deep-sea, primeval fish. I don't believe I have so lovingly contemplated an automobile IN MY LIFE. C-prints (pay attention to personal fave "Cats and Watermelons", from 1992) and paintings (the large "Tuttifrutti", 2008, all slashed gold, orange and apple-green circles, is a winner) ground this truly mixed discipline show, permitting wilder, intense works — "Dial Tone", from '92, a Japanese scroll-like offering composed of painstakingly cut and assembled phone-book page slivers, leaving just the numbers — to roam unfettered. OK, now go downstairs and stand under "Mobile Matrix" (2006), the gridded whale skeleton suspended above and swimming in the atrium's air. And since I learned from Rist's super-descriptive title that the atrium holds about 7354 cubic meters, you'll have to trust me until you see it for yourself, but this Orozco giant needs every bit of that space.
* Blank Dogs + Led Er Est @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. CanNOT wait to experience the hot, gloomy grit of Blank Dogs, but just remember: beneath all the distortion and electronics, those are some really dope pop songs. Led Er Est's darkwave + Gameboy antics should be a good foil.
* "Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR" (dir. Jonas Mekas, 2008) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 12:30p. The festival heavyweight (literally in its five-hour screentime and abstractly in the subject matter), Mekas' recounting of Lithuania's independence and inception into the United Nations from March '90 through Sept '91, told via his home video camera and daily news broadcasts. I've seen clips of this, in an installation of Mekas' at Stendhal Gallery, and it's riveting, given his particular POV and his means of documentation: you feel as though you are living it, the liberation of Mekas' homeland, through his eyes.
CURRENT SHOWS
* Olivier Zahm @ Half Gallery / 208 Forsyth St. Yum, typically sexy b&w (and a few color) prints from Zahm's close lens, of the requisite sudsy girls, cigarette haze, and twilit scenes. Several of the shots are accompanied by blown-up screenprints a la really wicked wallpaper, so the entire range functions sort of like an installation.
* Kazuo Shiraga "Six Decades" @ McCaffrey Fine Arts / 23 E 67th St. Lots of 1sts in this brief but intensely compelling show: 1st US solo show for the Zero-kai founder and Gutai member (think sort of like Japanese Fluxus, for absolute shorthand purposes); 1st in-depth catalogue in English; and I'll go ahead + posit that much of the works here (besides Shiraga's singular "Challenging Mud" from the mid-50s) have NEVER shown in the US. Much as contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Yves Klein approached the canvas w/ wildly new forms of abstraction, so did Shiraga, substituting his feet for brushes, to confidently energetic results. In fact, the range here is incredible, from the explosive reddish energy of "Chizensei Kirenji (Demon Face incarnated from Earthly Whole Star)" (Shiraga's titles are amazing, and remind me of Keiji Haino's lengthy, descriptive song titles) from '61 to the heavily impasto'd "Kanyou" from '80 and "Souryuu no Mai (Dance of the Two-Headed Dragon)" from '94 — both of whose densely textured surfaces are lightened by diaphanous strains of green and white, respectively —, to the fluid "Funryuu (Jetstream)" from '73, a dance of b&w alkyd paint that half resembles the melted deliciousness remaining at the end of a chocolate-syrup-inundated sundae.
* Tracey Emin "Only God Knows I'm Good" @ Lehmann Maupin / 201 Chrystie St. An extensive show of Emin's scratchy linoprint drawings and 'sewn' works on paper — which are really cool b/c they reference one another, and I have to wonder how hard it was to get the embroidery to so closely resemble her particular handwriting and line style. The art? Sexual, debasing, tongue-in-cheek. And don't miss upstairs, the only way to see the show title, rendered in Emin's handwriting in white-hot neon, like a beacon way up there.
* Andrzej Zielinski "Shredders" @ DCKT Contemporary / 195 Bowery. Zielinski's history of rendering common, dated machines (faxes, cordless phones, shredders) in odd-color, banal fashion, just got a whole lot cooler. His latest exhibition, of the lowly paper shredder, contains like a dozen complex mixed media works (involving what looks to be either wood or foam) on panels, creating texture-rich reliefs of the classic office objet.
* Hiroyuki Nakamura "The Sky Above" @ Thierry Goldberg Projects / 5 Rivington St. Think of the bad guys from "The Hills Have Eyes", done up in Western duds. Or, if you will, a cross between Kabuki makeup and John Wayne.
* Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner @ Leo Castelli / 18 E 77th St #3. A deceptively simple show, ostensibly three artists comfortable w/ wall art. But that's such a cop-out! Weiner's hot-pink "LAID OUT FLAT BENT [NOW] THIS WAY TURNED [NOW] THAT WAY (i.e. LOOPED OVER)" grounds the other two, the sunny yellow ruled and wobbly lines from LeWitt's circa-1971 wall piece (in contemporary terms, it looks a bit like Wolfgang Laib's hand-sifted pollen installations) and two very intriguing takes from Sonnier. The noisy one, feat. flickering lights, latex and a motor, feels more typical but the other, a wall-mounted trapezoid of flock w/ string, intrigues in its rawness.
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
* Paul McCarthy "White Snow" @ Hauser & Wirth / 32 E 69th St. A deliciously dirty show of new works from the relentlessly deviant (yet always grandfatherly) artist — at massive 7x10' McCarthy-scale paper collages. Beyond his usual charcoal drawings and scribbly oil-stick, these works incl. tears from exhibition catalogues (Christie's bears sharp notice, esp. extended views of Jeff Koons' shows) and porn mags. Good old Paul! The bizarre titles ("GAP", "Michael Jackson", "100") generally come from some magazine element on the massive works and obscurely reference the on-page action. Though by the time we get to "Inside Her Ordeal", a personal fave, the aforementioned dense maelstroms wash away into a rather spare piece, w/ a glassy eyed Snow grinning out into oblivion.
* David Hockney "Paintings 2006-2009" @ Pacewildenstein / 534 W 25th St + 32 E 57th St. I never thought I'd enjoy a straightforward landscape painting show as much as I enjoyed Hockney's. His renderings of Yorkshire, which mostly involves glades, felled trees and bunches of hawthorne, through various seasons, are magnetizing. The colors are fanciful (purplish roads, orange grass) yet visceral in his capture of the specific lighting. And the depth of these, esp. the woods, stretch for miles away. You know those scenes in Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up", when David Hemmings is in the park and all you hear is the sound of the wind through the trees? That's what this exhibition feels like.
* Mike Kelley "Horizontal Tracking Lines" @ Gagosian / 555 W 24th St. Goodness, Kelley is a weirdo. His latest show is one heady trip, but it builds on his earlier accomplishments (coital rag-dolls, modified Abstract Expressionism, quirky video) so if you're familiar w/ his trickery, use his reputation to your advantage here. Expect: misshapen canvases bearing crudely rendered cartoonish or pornish figures amid smeared paint — and each of these is mounted on flat-color polychrome panels like massive pixels. Even better: the eponymous installation "Horizontal Tracking Shot of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms", which feat. more polychrome bars and three test-patterened video screens that project, once the click-track ends, random, split-second (and generally hilarious) Youtube clips. Think less his narrative-driven "Day is Done" and more like Luis Gispert's "Pony Show".
LAST CHANCE (closing this weekend)
* "Figment" Group Show @ Kumukumu Gallery / 42 Rivington St. Guest curator Florence Uchida culls Rob Wynne and Gina Ruggeri for this complementarily trippy show. Ruggeri's Mylar cutouts (caves, tree roots) break up the otherwise bare walls, though Wynne's contribution really shines. His accouterments, glass mushrooms and bronze eggs, recall Roxy Paine's attention to hallucinogenic detail, but retain a whimsical influence — pun intended.
* Sean Scully @ Galerie Lelong / 528 W 26th St. The neatest part of Scully's show is sorting out which canvases are linen and which are aluminum, as the fuzzy-edged blocks of paint take rather well to each. Though, like the press release, I dig "LANDBAR" quite a bit, as he exposes one panel of aluminum amid the painted surfaces.
* Aya Takano "Reintegrating Worlds" @ Skarstedt Gallery / 20 E 79th St. The 1st solo show from the young Kaikai Kiki artist is a beaut, all pastel-toned acrylics of girls and animals interacting in a sort of stoned contemporary take on Amami Oshima Islands culture. Beyond what appears to be a flooded subway, most of the action occurs outdoors, in a landscape occupied by deer and cats.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
fee's LIST (through 12/8)
WEDNESDAY
* David Chang w/ Mario Batali + Peter Meehan @ Strand Bookstore / 828 Broadway (NRQW/456/L to Union Square), 7p/FREE (word of advice: arrive early). Discussions only rarely figure into my LIST but I have to mention this one. I am bonkers about Momofuku owner/chef and pork-centric overlord Chang. He's talking about his debut cookbook w/ the NY Times' Meehan, the co-author, and Batali, who is also a superstar chef who doesn't shy from pig-related delicacies. Ideal followup: Momofuku Milk Bar.
* Planet of the Drums, feat. Dieselboy, AK 1200, DJ Dara @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (NQRW/456/JMZ to Canal St), 10:30p/$10 before midnight. This could be hot. Despite my love for proper drum 'n' bass, I never really got down w/ the American scene (give me Roni Size's crew or LTJ Bukem any day). But I've been out of the game for awhile, and these three guys exemplify classic stateside d'n'b — and hey, I haven't danced for seven hours straight in a lonnng time.
THURSDAY
* Denyse Thomasos "The Divide" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Thomasos' gridlike acrylics are still highly abstract but there are definable elements in all the noise, like think architectural schematics seen X-ray style from all angles at once.
* Josh Dorman @ Mary Ryan Gallery / 527 W 26th St. More highly intricate landscapes, but Dorman marries acrylic paint and ink w/ vintage maps, to wild Chagall-ian effect.
* Dan Friel + Knyfe Hyts 81 @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$8. This practically reads like a best-of-LIST roster @ this messy noisefest, w/ Parts & Labor's wheeze-electronics composer Friel on deck and Brooklyn's darkest no-wavers Knyfe Hyts 81 wielding their axes like, uh, axes, amid a swirl of feedback. w/ psych-rockers Dinowalrus.
* Family Portrait @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$6. So what if I saw Underwater Peoples' good-vibey Family Portrait twice like a week ago? I want to see them again dammit, and you should too.
FRIDAY
* Woods + Real Estate @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle, L to Jefferson), 8p/$10. This is big time: psychedelic freak-folksters Woods plus Ridgewood's extended-summer indie rockers Real Estate, in basically the best indie venue around. I've seen 'em both here, but not together!
* Big Troubles @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Nice. If I wasn't already committed to the Market Hotel show, I'd totally check out Real Estate's noisy labelmates out in Williamsburg.
* The Beets @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey), 8p/FREE. Launch party for the Degenerate Craft Fair http://degeneratecraftfair.com/ (think anti-art fair, w/ a bunch of local participants, 'zines, prints, jewelry, CDs etc), w/ a 10p performance by Queens sing-along kinda-punksters The Beets, and free Brooklyn Brewery beer before that. Totes cool. The DCF reappears next week w/ a pop-up shop in Wsburg and a fete in W Chelsea (stay tuned).
* "A Clockwork Orange" (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), midnight. Let ultraviolence aficionado Alex (a creep-ola Malcolm McDowell, looking fierce in a codpiece and forever spawning iconic Halloween costumes) lead your midnight w/ a spew of Nasdat slang and a discourse on Beethoven and shagging women, until the tables unavoidably turn.
SATURDAY
* Talk Normal w/ U.S. Girls + Air Waves @ Secret Project Robot / 210 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. HUGE show tonight, Brooklyn's finest no-wavers Talk Normal w/ Megan Remy's (aka U.S. Girls) box of FX (these bands have paired quite nicely before), v. super dreamy Air Waves (Nicole Schneit and crew). I'd totally be there...
* Pants Yell! + Fluffy Lumbers @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$8. ...if it wasn't for THIS show, Slumberland's geeky charmers Pants Yell! (whose new album "Received Pronunciation" epitomizes smart indie-rock, from the full-out jam "Rue de la Paix" to the introspective, strummy "Not Wrong") and Ridgewood indie dreamer Samuel Franklin (Fluffy Lumbers). Mayjah.
* "Namas (The House)" (dir. Šarūnas Bartas, 1997) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 3:30p. House as nation? Or house as knot keeping relationships, routines, comings and goings, together — even the inevitable separations? Bartas' film won the Un Certain Regard prize at 1997 Cannes.
SUNDAY
* Lithuanian Shorts screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 3p. Incl. "The Window" (1999) and "Vilkas (The Wolf)" (2008) by Julius Ziz, "Spring (Pavasaris)" (1997) by Valdas Navasaitis and more. Doesn't this just sound cool? When your friends ask you how you plan to spend part of your Sunday afternoon, you can tell them 'at a screening of Lithuanian shorts'.
* The Besties + The Specific Heats @ Bruar Falls / 295 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$7. Oh my goodness! If you missed The Specific Heats (Boston's high-fiving girl-guy-harmonizing quartet) like two weeks ago, see them again! They open for Brooklyn's sweet punk rockers The Besties, who are playing their last show this night. Expect a love-fest!!
TUESDAY
* Alcatraz Culture Party + Open Ocean @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. I can't stop listening to "Always Sometimes", this mesmerizing track from fashion-forward all-girl quartet Open Ocean's debut performance in mid-Oct. It's got a keyboard/bassline duet that sort of reminds me of The Cure. And Alcatraz Culture Party is the code-name of surf-noisy experimentalists Diego & Michi (Crash Diet Crew). w/ Somnambulists (aka Warren Ng from This Invitation).
* Nate Wooley w/ C. Spencer Yeh + Chris Corsano @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/R/M to 9th St/4th Ave), 8p/$15. Second installation of improv trumpeter Wooley's "Seven Storey Mountain" project, and though I missed the 1st, I think I'll dig this one quite nicely. Why? B/c of inclusion of avant-violinist/electronics-noisician Yeh and drummer Corsano, whose shared backgrounds incl Okkyung Lee, Keiji Haino, Bjork, Thurston Moore, Jandek and loads other like-minded musicians. To call this evening 'No Fun' would be tongue-in-cheek.
* Parts & Labor @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/FREE. I love these guys, and though they've slightly tempered their math-rock sounds for subtle strains of indie-rock on their latest album "Receivers", they're still fierce as hell live, w/ Joe's machine-man drumming, BJ's yowling and Dan's wheezing electronics.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity" @ MoMA 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Not since 2006's Dada show have I been this excited about an 'historic' MoMA exhibition. Now, solo exhibitions (Joan Miro's unparalleled decade-spanning show last winter plus Van Gogh's spirit-lifting "Colors of the Night" mini-show last fall, in particular) do not count, as what I just included in parenthesis are beyond dope. MoMA has a knack for nailing proper solo-artist shows — I've spoken about this at length in past LISTs and perhaps this is due a blog entry (feeslist.blogspot.com) soon, but that'll come. Group shows (historic or otherwise, just check MoMA's long-running contemporary hodgepodges, elevated just recently by the rather wicked "Here is Every", which closed this past March) tend to drag, like oh "Color Chart" and "Design and the Elastic Mind" (both Spring 2008) and the "Eye on Europe" multiples show from Winter 2007. Sorry, couldn't get into them! So going into Bauhaus expecting no doubt a history lesson, let's just say much as I thought I dug Bauhaus, I was still a little tentative.
This is a great show. This is a really great show. Unless you are a Bauhaus-fanatic, you'll learn something here, probably a lot here, and it's a very noninvasive lesson. You meander through the loads of mixed media stuff on display, roughly in chronological order (broken up largely by the leaders Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe), take it all in, and are then surprised later by how familiar so much of this stuff is. Like the Marianne Brandt- and Hin Bredendieck-designed table lamps from about 1930 — they're so commonly lovely steel lamps, nothing extraneous, just several combined cones and planes. Or an easier one: Marcel Breuer, whose furniture like the striking tubular-steel "Club Chair (B3)", forever epitomized in 'cool' hotel lounges and YOU TOO CAN OWN (a replica), it's here too, many Breuer chairs, plus steel-and-plywood nesting tables that sort of resemble Josef Albers' glossier (and one could suggest: more elegant?) stackable tables, made of ash veneer and colored glass. Or Gropius' "Newspaper Shelf", this gorgeous serpentine mahogany structure, from '28. Hey, now, you're probably thinking: Brian, you are really going on about interior designy stuff (I didn't even mention Anni Albers' silvery silk and wool wall hangings! Or Hans-Joachim Rose's 'typeset' fabric swatches!), even though you claim to 1) be ignorant of and 2) disdain that stuff. Yes, true, but this is Bauhaus and proper contemporary design owes loads to Bauhaus. It's so obvious, just looking at these deceptively simple, clean, elegant yet utilitarian designs. OK enough of that. Beyond the furniture, there's loads else to see. I found the 'texture analyses' and 'color studies' ((led by Johannes Itten and Paul Klee w/ their students) very cool, and Klee offers a bunch of brilliant examples of his playful, mechanical work. Like personal fave "Twittering Machine" (1922), which I think I've seen both here and at the Met, in various shows, and palette-related "The Angler" (1921) — but his paintings on black ground, which tend towards neon-y colors, really excel. Like "Mystical Ceramic (in the manner of a still life)" (1925), situated around actual still-life-quality stuff, like a Carl Jakob Jucker-designed samovar) and the fun "Puppet Theatre" (1923), deftly augmented by Klee's own hand-puppets for his children (nice one, MoMA). Like Josef Albers' ridiculously beautiful glass grid pieces, from the earlier stained glass-styled works ("Park" from 1924 is like early Gerhard Richter color study) to the super-delicate later glass reliefs — the suite of "Skyscrapers" from 1929 end the Bauhaus exhibition on a particularly lovely note.
+ Tim Burton. Probably the busiest show you will attend at MoMA (recalling Van Gogh's "Colors of the Night", see above) through April 2010. There must have been several thousand trying to get into the iconoclastic director's (and artist's — yes that's what this exhibition is about, his drawings, paintings, maquettes etc) show, in multiple queues. Word of advice: if y'r not a member, prepare to buy a timed-entry ticket, which is prone to selling out ahead of time. With that, I am a member so I had no trouble entering Burton's show, and I can safely deem it "OK". It's not strictly kid's stuff — anyone who's seen his darker films ("Sleepy Hollow" in particular) can attest; but it's a bit childish in parts and quite a bit otaku-ish (sort of like "fanboy") in others. You enter the exhibition through a carnival-sized goblin mouth, proceeding across what I took to be the goblin's esophagus (masked as a corridor lined w/ video modules and so, so many slow-moving people), into a nice black-lit chamber. This was a pleasant surprise, as amid Burton's glowing small-scale paintings rested a life-size Oogie Boogie behind glass (my favorite character from "The Nightmare Before Christmas") and a rather wild neon 10'-tall demonic carousel. Exit this and you're practically thrown into the maelstrom, a very crowded labyrinthine gallery full of Burton's drawings, sculpture, paintings and the like. Description: everything tends towards distended limbs, enormous mouths, bugs, humans, aliens, three-eyed clowns (he's got a "Clowns series", apparently), animals. There are character studies of what appear to be Edward Scissorhands (though way more cartoony, not dreamy Johnny Depp-channelling-Robert-Smith), plus Hollywood memorabilia (Batman helmets, other costumes). If there'd been the iron maiden from "Sleepy Hollow", I think I would've had a nervous breakdown. Also notably absent: anything recalling "Planet of the Apes" (remember that?). Low points: the fanboyish costumes and the "Sweeney Todd" pearl-handled razors (talk about sadistic!). High points: black-light room and the Stainboy toy house, aglow w/ Christmas lights and positioned conveniently near the exit.
* Justine Cooper "Living in Sim" @ Daneyal Mahmood Gallery / 511 W 25th St 3rd Fl. Cooper's marriage of science and art takes on an unsettling, visceral air in this 'soap opera' of medical mannequins. Her medium-sized C-prints of glassy-eyed dummies in hospital robes and under the knife or otherwise intubated, in situ, recall both Trevor Brown and Ed Keinholz w/ their respective loving attention to detail and accuracy. But it's Cooper's eponymous photo installation, multiple-POV headshots and detail shots of medical professionals and their patients, mouths agape in what you could interpret as either fear, warning or shock, as their (and conversely OUR) health insurance is compromised.
* Su-Mei Tse "Words and Memories" @ Peter Blum Gallery / 526 W 29th St. A delight for the eyes and ears; Tse's latest really transcends easy description, but it's a joy to experience. Her tubular fluorescent sculpture, here a swing, there a birdcage, are fun but are diminished by several audio-rich installations, augmented by her partner Jean-Lou Majerus. These include "Many Spoken Words", a bubbling cast-iron ink fountain, think the reverence of Charles Ray w/ the opportunity for a huge mess (a la Paul McCarthy or Andres Serrano, maybe); the hypnotic "Floating Memories" (whose shimmering walnut veneer and resin platform plays off the skipping LP); and deceptively simple "Sound for Insomniacs", five large C-prints of cats w/ related MP3 players — listen in and hear the saturated, satisfied purrs, and challenge yourself not to be lulled to sleep.
* Anna Jóelsdóttir "priest chews velvet haddock" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Roughly half this show is composed of Jóelsdóttir's acrylic, ink and colored pencil 'drawings', which look like highly complex smears and zaps of color (oilslick-style), some disintegrating her former color planes. The rest are chimeric 'installations', great Mylar panels ruched, twisted, stapled, tacked, and mounted — or for a better word 'slung' across walls, crawling up pipes, one tentlike shape appears to be retreating into the ceiling tiles. These amorphous screens are literally covered w/ the Icelandic artist's kinetic scribbles and poolings of color.
* Dan Flavin "Series and Progressions" @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. A gorgeous, sobering investigation into the Minimalist's core practice of repetition and color. Begin w/ the jewel-box "alternating pink and 'gold'" at 519, a three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods. Note the fuzzy-edged vibrations, how pairing the two colors turn the pinks whitish and the yellows lemony. In 525 you pass through a series of rooms, from the warm yellow and cherry-red pairings through the shock-saturated blue/reds and shimmering greens, ending on almost a sunrise-like blast of brightness. The seminal all-white "the nominal three (to William of Ockham)" acts as a palate-cleanser before the brilliant cage-like "untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with love and affection"), a white-hot bluish latticework extending across the breadth of 533's space.
* Yue Minjun "Smile-isms" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. Yue's guffawing, grimacing 'self'-portraits are a bunch of active men, throwing baseballs, climbing trees, sitting crosslegged on a diving board like a bunch of demure bathing beauties... What's the dialogue? Well, in these gorgeous color lithographs, maybe Yue means, in order to do these activities properly, the State wants you to enjoy the hell out of them. Be happy all the time! Check the gigantic Yue, yawning mouth stretching over a field of cattle, for a more literal impact.
* Liu Ye "Leave Me in the Dark" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. I love Ye's haunting, spare acrylics, which mostly capture a solitary doll-like girl in scenarios worth of Rene Magritte. She might be reading a book or standing, raincoated and w/ luggage but w/ her back turned to the viewer — and suddenly everything is just a bit less familiar. Ye's 'compositions', of bamboo, blocks and drugs, are rendered w/ a scalpel's clarity, but lack the gauzy beauty of his portraiture.
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
LAST CHANCE
* Paul Chan "Sade for Sade's sake" @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St 8th Fl. Word of advice before entering this brilliant narrative projection, arguably the standout work when it premiered at the 53rd Venice Biennale: you won't see the whole thing. Chan's centerpiece is nearly six hours long and there are no benches. But linger over the stark shadowy figures in various states of coitus and violence, covered now and then by abstract floating geometric shapes. If you're lucky, you'll see multicolored blocks, like translucent tinted tiles, sweeping across a landscape of de Sade's making. But if you hang around even for 10 minutes you'll experience the unnerving, graceful ballet of orgy, whippings, beatings, masturbation (with figures now and then speaking to one another), amid shapes that either obscure the action or flood past like the great shadows of trees and landscapes from the window of a train. Chan's loose ink drawings in the side galleries augment the action on the wall.
* Emi Uchida "Lines" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. The artist's influences are clearer than ever in this series of obscured works on paper. Uchida's shunga-inspired drawings (Edo-era erotic woodcut works) are veiled by her signature wavy charcoal lines.
* Tim Eitel "New Paintings" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Eitel's stark humanist renderings are moodily humorous as ever — figures in uncomfortable repose, homeless tents, misshapen piles of clothes, ruffled birds — but he's shrunk his canvases down now to book-sized, permitting nothing but the intensity of what's on paint to engulf your vision.
* Wolfgang Laib "Frieze of Life" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. The standout piece here, in Laib's typically spare show, is his rather literally titled "Pollen from Hazelnut". This belies the impact of the enormous fuzzy-edged yellow rectangle on the gallery floor, the result of several jars of hand-sifted pollen. It's like Rothko on the floor, sort of.
* David Chang w/ Mario Batali + Peter Meehan @ Strand Bookstore / 828 Broadway (NRQW/456/L to Union Square), 7p/FREE (word of advice: arrive early). Discussions only rarely figure into my LIST but I have to mention this one. I am bonkers about Momofuku owner/chef and pork-centric overlord Chang. He's talking about his debut cookbook w/ the NY Times' Meehan, the co-author, and Batali, who is also a superstar chef who doesn't shy from pig-related delicacies. Ideal followup: Momofuku Milk Bar.
* Planet of the Drums, feat. Dieselboy, AK 1200, DJ Dara @ Santos Party House / 96 Lafayette St (NQRW/456/JMZ to Canal St), 10:30p/$10 before midnight. This could be hot. Despite my love for proper drum 'n' bass, I never really got down w/ the American scene (give me Roni Size's crew or LTJ Bukem any day). But I've been out of the game for awhile, and these three guys exemplify classic stateside d'n'b — and hey, I haven't danced for seven hours straight in a lonnng time.
THURSDAY
* Denyse Thomasos "The Divide" @ Lennon, Weinberg Inc / 514 W 25th St. Thomasos' gridlike acrylics are still highly abstract but there are definable elements in all the noise, like think architectural schematics seen X-ray style from all angles at once.
* Josh Dorman @ Mary Ryan Gallery / 527 W 26th St. More highly intricate landscapes, but Dorman marries acrylic paint and ink w/ vintage maps, to wild Chagall-ian effect.
* Dan Friel + Knyfe Hyts 81 @ Union Pool / 484 Union Ave, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 9p/$8. This practically reads like a best-of-LIST roster @ this messy noisefest, w/ Parts & Labor's wheeze-electronics composer Friel on deck and Brooklyn's darkest no-wavers Knyfe Hyts 81 wielding their axes like, uh, axes, amid a swirl of feedback. w/ psych-rockers Dinowalrus.
* Family Portrait @ Cameo Gallery / 93 N 6th St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 8p/$6. So what if I saw Underwater Peoples' good-vibey Family Portrait twice like a week ago? I want to see them again dammit, and you should too.
FRIDAY
* Woods + Real Estate @ Market Hotel / 1142 Myrtle Ave, Bushwick (JMZ to Myrtle, L to Jefferson), 8p/$10. This is big time: psychedelic freak-folksters Woods plus Ridgewood's extended-summer indie rockers Real Estate, in basically the best indie venue around. I've seen 'em both here, but not together!
* Big Troubles @ Monster Island Basement / 128 River St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$7. Nice. If I wasn't already committed to the Market Hotel show, I'd totally check out Real Estate's noisy labelmates out in Williamsburg.
* The Beets @ Silent Barn / 915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood (L to Halsey), 8p/FREE. Launch party for the Degenerate Craft Fair http://degeneratecraftfair.com/ (think anti-art fair, w/ a bunch of local participants, 'zines, prints, jewelry, CDs etc), w/ a 10p performance by Queens sing-along kinda-punksters The Beets, and free Brooklyn Brewery beer before that. Totes cool. The DCF reappears next week w/ a pop-up shop in Wsburg and a fete in W Chelsea (stay tuned).
* "A Clockwork Orange" (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971) screening @ IFC Center / 323 Sixth Ave (ACE/BDFV to W 4th St), midnight. Let ultraviolence aficionado Alex (a creep-ola Malcolm McDowell, looking fierce in a codpiece and forever spawning iconic Halloween costumes) lead your midnight w/ a spew of Nasdat slang and a discourse on Beethoven and shagging women, until the tables unavoidably turn.
SATURDAY
* Talk Normal w/ U.S. Girls + Air Waves @ Secret Project Robot / 210 Kent Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JM to Marcy), 8p/$8. HUGE show tonight, Brooklyn's finest no-wavers Talk Normal w/ Megan Remy's (aka U.S. Girls) box of FX (these bands have paired quite nicely before), v. super dreamy Air Waves (Nicole Schneit and crew). I'd totally be there...
* Pants Yell! + Fluffy Lumbers @ Bruar Falls / 245 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$8. ...if it wasn't for THIS show, Slumberland's geeky charmers Pants Yell! (whose new album "Received Pronunciation" epitomizes smart indie-rock, from the full-out jam "Rue de la Paix" to the introspective, strummy "Not Wrong") and Ridgewood indie dreamer Samuel Franklin (Fluffy Lumbers). Mayjah.
* "Namas (The House)" (dir. Šarūnas Bartas, 1997) screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 3:30p. House as nation? Or house as knot keeping relationships, routines, comings and goings, together — even the inevitable separations? Bartas' film won the Un Certain Regard prize at 1997 Cannes.
SUNDAY
* Lithuanian Shorts screening @ MoMA / 11 W 53rd St, 3p. Incl. "The Window" (1999) and "Vilkas (The Wolf)" (2008) by Julius Ziz, "Spring (Pavasaris)" (1997) by Valdas Navasaitis and more. Doesn't this just sound cool? When your friends ask you how you plan to spend part of your Sunday afternoon, you can tell them 'at a screening of Lithuanian shorts'.
* The Besties + The Specific Heats @ Bruar Falls / 295 Grand St, Williamsburg (L/G to Lorimer), 8p/$7. Oh my goodness! If you missed The Specific Heats (Boston's high-fiving girl-guy-harmonizing quartet) like two weeks ago, see them again! They open for Brooklyn's sweet punk rockers The Besties, who are playing their last show this night. Expect a love-fest!!
TUESDAY
* Alcatraz Culture Party + Open Ocean @ Death By Audio / 49 S 2nd St, Williamsburg (L to Bedford, JMZ to Marcy), 8p/$7. I can't stop listening to "Always Sometimes", this mesmerizing track from fashion-forward all-girl quartet Open Ocean's debut performance in mid-Oct. It's got a keyboard/bassline duet that sort of reminds me of The Cure. And Alcatraz Culture Party is the code-name of surf-noisy experimentalists Diego & Michi (Crash Diet Crew). w/ Somnambulists (aka Warren Ng from This Invitation).
* Nate Wooley w/ C. Spencer Yeh + Chris Corsano @ ISSUE Project Room / 232 3rd St, Gowanus (F/R/M to 9th St/4th Ave), 8p/$15. Second installation of improv trumpeter Wooley's "Seven Storey Mountain" project, and though I missed the 1st, I think I'll dig this one quite nicely. Why? B/c of inclusion of avant-violinist/electronics-noisician Yeh and drummer Corsano, whose shared backgrounds incl Okkyung Lee, Keiji Haino, Bjork, Thurston Moore, Jandek and loads other like-minded musicians. To call this evening 'No Fun' would be tongue-in-cheek.
* Parts & Labor @ Brooklyn Bowl / 61 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg (L to Bedford), 9p/FREE. I love these guys, and though they've slightly tempered their math-rock sounds for subtle strains of indie-rock on their latest album "Receivers", they're still fierce as hell live, w/ Joe's machine-man drumming, BJ's yowling and Dan's wheezing electronics.
CURRENT SHOWS
* "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity" @ MoMA 11 W 53rd St (E/V to 5th Ave, 6 to 51st St). Not since 2006's Dada show have I been this excited about an 'historic' MoMA exhibition. Now, solo exhibitions (Joan Miro's unparalleled decade-spanning show last winter plus Van Gogh's spirit-lifting "Colors of the Night" mini-show last fall, in particular) do not count, as what I just included in parenthesis are beyond dope. MoMA has a knack for nailing proper solo-artist shows — I've spoken about this at length in past LISTs and perhaps this is due a blog entry (feeslist.blogspot.com) soon, but that'll come. Group shows (historic or otherwise, just check MoMA's long-running contemporary hodgepodges, elevated just recently by the rather wicked "Here is Every", which closed this past March) tend to drag, like oh "Color Chart" and "Design and the Elastic Mind" (both Spring 2008) and the "Eye on Europe" multiples show from Winter 2007. Sorry, couldn't get into them! So going into Bauhaus expecting no doubt a history lesson, let's just say much as I thought I dug Bauhaus, I was still a little tentative.
This is a great show. This is a really great show. Unless you are a Bauhaus-fanatic, you'll learn something here, probably a lot here, and it's a very noninvasive lesson. You meander through the loads of mixed media stuff on display, roughly in chronological order (broken up largely by the leaders Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe), take it all in, and are then surprised later by how familiar so much of this stuff is. Like the Marianne Brandt- and Hin Bredendieck-designed table lamps from about 1930 — they're so commonly lovely steel lamps, nothing extraneous, just several combined cones and planes. Or an easier one: Marcel Breuer, whose furniture like the striking tubular-steel "Club Chair (B3)", forever epitomized in 'cool' hotel lounges and YOU TOO CAN OWN (a replica), it's here too, many Breuer chairs, plus steel-and-plywood nesting tables that sort of resemble Josef Albers' glossier (and one could suggest: more elegant?) stackable tables, made of ash veneer and colored glass. Or Gropius' "Newspaper Shelf", this gorgeous serpentine mahogany structure, from '28. Hey, now, you're probably thinking: Brian, you are really going on about interior designy stuff (I didn't even mention Anni Albers' silvery silk and wool wall hangings! Or Hans-Joachim Rose's 'typeset' fabric swatches!), even though you claim to 1) be ignorant of and 2) disdain that stuff. Yes, true, but this is Bauhaus and proper contemporary design owes loads to Bauhaus. It's so obvious, just looking at these deceptively simple, clean, elegant yet utilitarian designs. OK enough of that. Beyond the furniture, there's loads else to see. I found the 'texture analyses' and 'color studies' ((led by Johannes Itten and Paul Klee w/ their students) very cool, and Klee offers a bunch of brilliant examples of his playful, mechanical work. Like personal fave "Twittering Machine" (1922), which I think I've seen both here and at the Met, in various shows, and palette-related "The Angler" (1921) — but his paintings on black ground, which tend towards neon-y colors, really excel. Like "Mystical Ceramic (in the manner of a still life)" (1925), situated around actual still-life-quality stuff, like a Carl Jakob Jucker-designed samovar) and the fun "Puppet Theatre" (1923), deftly augmented by Klee's own hand-puppets for his children (nice one, MoMA). Like Josef Albers' ridiculously beautiful glass grid pieces, from the earlier stained glass-styled works ("Park" from 1924 is like early Gerhard Richter color study) to the super-delicate later glass reliefs — the suite of "Skyscrapers" from 1929 end the Bauhaus exhibition on a particularly lovely note.
+ Tim Burton. Probably the busiest show you will attend at MoMA (recalling Van Gogh's "Colors of the Night", see above) through April 2010. There must have been several thousand trying to get into the iconoclastic director's (and artist's — yes that's what this exhibition is about, his drawings, paintings, maquettes etc) show, in multiple queues. Word of advice: if y'r not a member, prepare to buy a timed-entry ticket, which is prone to selling out ahead of time. With that, I am a member so I had no trouble entering Burton's show, and I can safely deem it "OK". It's not strictly kid's stuff — anyone who's seen his darker films ("Sleepy Hollow" in particular) can attest; but it's a bit childish in parts and quite a bit otaku-ish (sort of like "fanboy") in others. You enter the exhibition through a carnival-sized goblin mouth, proceeding across what I took to be the goblin's esophagus (masked as a corridor lined w/ video modules and so, so many slow-moving people), into a nice black-lit chamber. This was a pleasant surprise, as amid Burton's glowing small-scale paintings rested a life-size Oogie Boogie behind glass (my favorite character from "The Nightmare Before Christmas") and a rather wild neon 10'-tall demonic carousel. Exit this and you're practically thrown into the maelstrom, a very crowded labyrinthine gallery full of Burton's drawings, sculpture, paintings and the like. Description: everything tends towards distended limbs, enormous mouths, bugs, humans, aliens, three-eyed clowns (he's got a "Clowns series", apparently), animals. There are character studies of what appear to be Edward Scissorhands (though way more cartoony, not dreamy Johnny Depp-channelling-Robert-Smith), plus Hollywood memorabilia (Batman helmets, other costumes). If there'd been the iron maiden from "Sleepy Hollow", I think I would've had a nervous breakdown. Also notably absent: anything recalling "Planet of the Apes" (remember that?). Low points: the fanboyish costumes and the "Sweeney Todd" pearl-handled razors (talk about sadistic!). High points: black-light room and the Stainboy toy house, aglow w/ Christmas lights and positioned conveniently near the exit.
* Justine Cooper "Living in Sim" @ Daneyal Mahmood Gallery / 511 W 25th St 3rd Fl. Cooper's marriage of science and art takes on an unsettling, visceral air in this 'soap opera' of medical mannequins. Her medium-sized C-prints of glassy-eyed dummies in hospital robes and under the knife or otherwise intubated, in situ, recall both Trevor Brown and Ed Keinholz w/ their respective loving attention to detail and accuracy. But it's Cooper's eponymous photo installation, multiple-POV headshots and detail shots of medical professionals and their patients, mouths agape in what you could interpret as either fear, warning or shock, as their (and conversely OUR) health insurance is compromised.
* Su-Mei Tse "Words and Memories" @ Peter Blum Gallery / 526 W 29th St. A delight for the eyes and ears; Tse's latest really transcends easy description, but it's a joy to experience. Her tubular fluorescent sculpture, here a swing, there a birdcage, are fun but are diminished by several audio-rich installations, augmented by her partner Jean-Lou Majerus. These include "Many Spoken Words", a bubbling cast-iron ink fountain, think the reverence of Charles Ray w/ the opportunity for a huge mess (a la Paul McCarthy or Andres Serrano, maybe); the hypnotic "Floating Memories" (whose shimmering walnut veneer and resin platform plays off the skipping LP); and deceptively simple "Sound for Insomniacs", five large C-prints of cats w/ related MP3 players — listen in and hear the saturated, satisfied purrs, and challenge yourself not to be lulled to sleep.
* Anna Jóelsdóttir "priest chews velvet haddock" @ STUX Gallery / 530 W 25th St. Roughly half this show is composed of Jóelsdóttir's acrylic, ink and colored pencil 'drawings', which look like highly complex smears and zaps of color (oilslick-style), some disintegrating her former color planes. The rest are chimeric 'installations', great Mylar panels ruched, twisted, stapled, tacked, and mounted — or for a better word 'slung' across walls, crawling up pipes, one tentlike shape appears to be retreating into the ceiling tiles. These amorphous screens are literally covered w/ the Icelandic artist's kinetic scribbles and poolings of color.
* Dan Flavin "Series and Progressions" @ David Zwirner / 519-533 W 19th St. A gorgeous, sobering investigation into the Minimalist's core practice of repetition and color. Begin w/ the jewel-box "alternating pink and 'gold'" at 519, a three-wall installation of sugary pink and goldenrod fluorescent rods. Note the fuzzy-edged vibrations, how pairing the two colors turn the pinks whitish and the yellows lemony. In 525 you pass through a series of rooms, from the warm yellow and cherry-red pairings through the shock-saturated blue/reds and shimmering greens, ending on almost a sunrise-like blast of brightness. The seminal all-white "the nominal three (to William of Ockham)" acts as a palate-cleanser before the brilliant cage-like "untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with love and affection"), a white-hot bluish latticework extending across the breadth of 533's space.
* Yue Minjun "Smile-isms" @ Arario NY / 521 W 25th St. Yue's guffawing, grimacing 'self'-portraits are a bunch of active men, throwing baseballs, climbing trees, sitting crosslegged on a diving board like a bunch of demure bathing beauties... What's the dialogue? Well, in these gorgeous color lithographs, maybe Yue means, in order to do these activities properly, the State wants you to enjoy the hell out of them. Be happy all the time! Check the gigantic Yue, yawning mouth stretching over a field of cattle, for a more literal impact.
* Liu Ye "Leave Me in the Dark" @ Sperone Westwater / 415 W 13th St. I love Ye's haunting, spare acrylics, which mostly capture a solitary doll-like girl in scenarios worth of Rene Magritte. She might be reading a book or standing, raincoated and w/ luggage but w/ her back turned to the viewer — and suddenly everything is just a bit less familiar. Ye's 'compositions', of bamboo, blocks and drugs, are rendered w/ a scalpel's clarity, but lack the gauzy beauty of his portraiture.
* Lynda Benglis @ Cheim & Read / 547 W 25th St. Frozen bubblebath, my first thought upon viewing Benglis' tinted polyurethane sculpture "Swinburne Figure I", part of her exhibition of new relief works at the gallery. Everything crawls along the wall here, from other globular polyurethane objet (check the esp. effective orange-sun "D'Arrest") to the black patina'd bronzes (mimicking either coral reefs or coagulated chocolatey breakfast cereal), like the hand-like "Figure 3" and animale "Figure 5".
LAST CHANCE
* Paul Chan "Sade for Sade's sake" @ Greene Naftali / 508 W 26th St 8th Fl. Word of advice before entering this brilliant narrative projection, arguably the standout work when it premiered at the 53rd Venice Biennale: you won't see the whole thing. Chan's centerpiece is nearly six hours long and there are no benches. But linger over the stark shadowy figures in various states of coitus and violence, covered now and then by abstract floating geometric shapes. If you're lucky, you'll see multicolored blocks, like translucent tinted tiles, sweeping across a landscape of de Sade's making. But if you hang around even for 10 minutes you'll experience the unnerving, graceful ballet of orgy, whippings, beatings, masturbation (with figures now and then speaking to one another), amid shapes that either obscure the action or flood past like the great shadows of trees and landscapes from the window of a train. Chan's loose ink drawings in the side galleries augment the action on the wall.
* Emi Uchida "Lines" @ Onishi Gallery / 521 W 26th St. The artist's influences are clearer than ever in this series of obscured works on paper. Uchida's shunga-inspired drawings (Edo-era erotic woodcut works) are veiled by her signature wavy charcoal lines.
* Tim Eitel "New Paintings" @ Pacewildenstein / 545 W 22nd St. Eitel's stark humanist renderings are moodily humorous as ever — figures in uncomfortable repose, homeless tents, misshapen piles of clothes, ruffled birds — but he's shrunk his canvases down now to book-sized, permitting nothing but the intensity of what's on paint to engulf your vision.
* Wolfgang Laib "Frieze of Life" @ Sean Kelly Gallery / 528 W 29th St. The standout piece here, in Laib's typically spare show, is his rather literally titled "Pollen from Hazelnut". This belies the impact of the enormous fuzzy-edged yellow rectangle on the gallery floor, the result of several jars of hand-sifted pollen. It's like Rothko on the floor, sort of.
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